Hope better predictor of academic achievement than intelligence

When it comes to predicting success, especially in the academic realm, hope does the best job.

Trumping general intelligence, previous academic achievement and personality, hope "uniquely predicts objective academic achievement," shows a three-year longitudinal study out of the University of Manchester.

The study followed 129 students as they entered university, measuring their pre-university grades and their final degree marks. Researchers tracked specific traits over the three-year term: trait hope — an individual's general or characteristic level of hope — general intelligence, the five-factor model of personality, divergent thinking, and objective measures of their academic performance.

Hope stood out as the major academic-achievement predictor.

This study isn't the first to make the hope-achievement connection.

A similar study out of Indianapolis, titled "Hope, but not optimism, predicts academic performance of law students beyond previous academic achievement" followed "initial levels of hope and optimism with subsequent academic performance and life satisfaction among first-year law students". These two discovered that hope, rather than optimism, predicted academic performance, while both hope and optimism contributed to life satisfaction.

"Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us,'" Michael J. Fox wrote in his memoir, "Always Looking Up."

When it comes to academic success, that "product of knowledge" seems to play a crucial role.