The study seeks to determine the extent to which university students’ personality traits and their self-esteem can serve as the bases for predicting their grade point average (GPA). The following groups of students from the Faculty of Education in Ljubljana participated in the research: 88 students attending the first year and 80 students attending the second year of the Primary Teacher Education programme, and 41 students attending the first year of the Social Pedagogy programme. The results showed that the three groups differ in terms of the degree to which personality traits and self-esteem account for individual differences in the GPA. A low level of self-esteem (a moderate predictive power) proved to be a significant GPA predictor with second year students of the Primary Teacher Education programme, whereas the GPA of the first year students of the Social Pedagogy programme was revealed to be highly predictable on the basis of the entire set of five personality traits (a substantial predictive power), with Conscientiousness and Energy as significant single predictors. The results suggest that the predictive power of students’ personality traits and self-esteem depends on the study programme and the academic achievements included in the GPA.
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