Consumption of alcohol and marijuana associated with lower GPA in college
Alcohol and marijuana are the two most abused substances in US colleges, but little is known about the effect of consuming both on students' academic performance. The authors of the present study examined the association between college students' alcohol and marijuana consumption and their grade point average (GPA) in each semester. They used data from the Brain and Alcohol Research in College Students study, which tracked 1,142 students for two years after they began college, and using self-reported data they clustered them into groups of low users or medium-to-high users of alcohol or both substances. Despite no differences in pre-college SAT scores, researchers found that students who were medium-to-high users of both substances not only had a lower predicted college GPA on average by the end of the first semester, but continued to achieve lower GPAs throughout the two years of the study. Those students who consumed medium-to-high levels of alcohol but little marijuana ...