The Effects of Alcohol Use on Academic Achievement in High School

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The first academic text is about the effects of alcohol use on academic achievement in high school. It stated how alcoholism can affect the students’ achievement when they are engaged in alcohol. They examined the impact of drinking on learning have faced two important limitations. First, they have relied on self-reported grades as the key measure of learning and are therefore subject to potential biases. Second, they have relied on cross-sectional data and suffer from potential biases due either to unobserved individual heterogeneity or to weak or questionable instrumental variables. In the present study, they contribute to the existing literature by exploiting several unique features of the nationally representative Add Health survey. First, they measure learning with grade point averages obtained from the respondents’ official school transcripts. Second, they exploit Add Health’s longitudinal design to estimate models with individual fixed effects. The analysis also reveals some interesting gender differences in how alcohol consumption affects learning in high school. Finally, the study also highlights the potential pitfalls of using self-reported grades to measure academic performance.

The second academic text is all about how an alcohol drinker student performs in the class, i.e., poor class attendance, increased drop-out rates, and lower grades. It further states that health can also be affected, particularly the brain. Alcohol affects learning and memory, verbal skills and visual-spatial cognition. It was also mentioned that drinkers are not as skilled as non-drinkers. Those students who avoid alcohol use and other drugs scored higher. Those who use alcohol are five times more likely to drop out than those who don't use alcohol.

The result of study shows that in general, increases in alcohol consumption result in statistically significant but quantitatively small reductions in GPA for male students and in statistically non-significant changes for females. The analysis also reveals some interesting gender differences in how alcohol consumption affects learning in high school. For males, alcohol consumption has a small negative effect on GPA and results to increase absences. For females, GPA is not that affected but can experience some difficulties at school. The study also emphasizes the potential pitfalls of using self-reported grades to measure academic performance. It further highlights that drinking is associated with grade inflation among females and grade deflation among males.

Based on the article, alcohol plays too significant role in the society particularly to middle school students regarding their grades. Those students having alcohol problems results to having poor performance and low grades in school. To be more specific,