  Student's grade retention is a key issue faced by many education systems,
especially those in developing countries. In this paper, we seek to gauge the
relevance of students' personality traits in predicting grade retention in
Brazil. For that, we used data collected in 2012 and 2017, in the city of
Sertaozinho, countryside of the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The surveys taken
in Sertaozinho included several socioeconomic questions, standardized tests,
and a personality test. Moreover, students were in grades 4, 5, and 6 in 2012.
Our approach was based on training machine learning models on the surveys' data
to predict grade retention between 2012 and 2017 using information from 2012 or
before, and then using some strategies to quantify personality traits'
predictive power. We concluded that, besides proving to be fairly better than a
random classifier when isolated, personality traits contribute to prediction
even when using socioeconomic variables and standardized tests results.
