Big Five Personality Traits and Academic Performance in Russian Universities

We study which Big Five personality traits are associated with academic performance among a sample of Russian university students using results from the Unified State Examination (for university admissions) and their current grade point averages as measures of academic performance. We find that Introversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness to experience have observable ties to academic performance. Those results partially confirm existing international studies, but our findings are notable for the relative unimportance of conscientiousness for success in our Russian sample. We suggest that cross-cultural differences in educational environment may explain why this trait seems less obviously important in the analysis