As part of a larger project studying the connection between non-cognitive and affective (NCA) factors and different forms of student success (academics, retention, well-being, etc.), this paper analyzed how different forms of students’ GPAs in mathematics, science, engineering, and STEM overall were affected by students anxiety to take tests. Using path analysis, the authors found that test anxiety did significantly affect all the above GPA forms. In fact, results suggest that higher test anxiety leads to higher GPA which is undoubtedly concerning to researchers and practitioners alike. Additionally, authors found that these effects were significantly higher for female and non-binary students. Noting that women often outperform men in engineering, these results support previous work suggesting engineering education enforces a “gender filter” which only allows the best performing women in. These findings are particularly relevant towards STRIDE’s mission to make engineering education’s culture more inclusive. Findings and discussions will be studied further in future work.

The STRIDE group congratulates the author team who presented this work at ASEE’s virtual conference Wednesday, June 24^th, 2020.