Reimagining the Success Discourse in a Higher Education Institution in South Africa: Potential Cum Laude and Summa Cum Laude Undergraduate Students’ Perspectives

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-006-0_5How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Success; Higher Education; Undergraduate Students; Academic Support and Academic performance

Abstract

Universities in South Africa enhance undergraduate students’ success by largely focusing on the provision of remedial academic support. The target of the structured support is to assist those undergraduate students categorised as ‘at-risk’ of not progressing in their studies and or failing to stay on course to complete successfully. Inadvertently, such support is inherently reactive, whilst excluding students who are on course to graduate in record time, including many with cum laude or summa cum laude potential. Consequently, the student success discourse in many South African universities is informed by focus on students’ weaknesses rather than their strengths. This paper draws on a project implemented in the School of Education at a South African University. It explored the perspectives of potential cum laude and summa cum laude undergraduate (CLSL) students on their high academic performance to understand their success traits. Using a qualitative approach, Auto Scholar Advisor system enabled the process of identifying these students. Data were collected through qualitative methods using semi-structured individual interview and focus group. The 10 participants were drawn from a cohort of 1000 CLSL students registered in the School of Education in 2022. They were selected using maximum variation sampling. The data were analysed using thematic analysis method. The findings suggest that the participants characterised their high-performance traits in ways that reveal their capacity for self-authorship. Beyond that, the findings point to evidence of participants’ intentionality and determination in developing their success traits of self-authorship. This finding indicates that student success traits are learnable, which implies the need to refocus the discourse of academic support for undergraduate students’ success in the school. We argue that proactive and structured academic support that enables students to develop their high-performance strengths can augment current reactive remedial support practices.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - S. D. Khumalo
AU  - V. Nnadozi
AU  - A. Mahadew
AU  - R. Rawatlal
AU  - P. Mazibuko
AU  - C. Mpungose
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/07
TI  - Reimagining the Success Discourse in a Higher Education Institution in South Africa: Potential Cum Laude and Summa Cum Laude Undergraduate Students’ Perspectives
BT  - Proceedings of The Focus Conference (TFC 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 40
EP  - 59
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-006-0_5
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-006-0_5
ID  - Khumalo2023
ER  -