  Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential
part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance
of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. Because
most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small
sample sizes, there is currently no quantification of the interplay of these
factors. Here, we study the academic performance among a cohort of 538
undergraduate students forming a single, densely connected social network. Our
work is based on data collected using smartphones, which the students used as
their primary phones for two years. The availability of multi-channel data from
a single population allows us to directly compare the explanatory power of
individual and social characteristics. We find that the most informative
indicators of performance are based on social ties and that network indicators
result in better model performance than individual characteristics (including
both personality and class attendance). We confirm earlier findings that class
attendance is the most important predictor among individual characteristics.
Finally, our results suggest the presence of strong homophily and/or peer
effects among university students.
