Students' study habits and party habits can both affect their GPA, so researchers have come up with an app that tracks smartphone activity - and yields a prediction of GPA scores accurate to within 0.17 of a point.

The SmartGPA app, developed by researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of Texas at Austin, makes use of a smartphone's sensors to determine exactly when a student is studying, sleeping or partying.

Used in conjunction with "periodic self reports," the app can provide real-time feedback on how their activities might affect their GPA scores, the developers say.

"Many cognitive, behavioral and environmental factors impact student learning during college," says Andrew Campbell, a Dartmouth computer science professor and lead author of a paper describing the development of the app.

"Our SmartGPA results show there are a number of important study and social behaviors automatically inferred from smartphone sensing data that significantly correlate with term and cumulative GPA."

In a test of the app's performance, it was installed on the phones of 30 Dartmouth undergraduates, and researchers kept track of them during the 10-week school term.

Data from sensors on the phones and in the cloud was analyzed using machine learning algorithms to track behaviors such as the frequency or duration of partying, and the focus and duration of study periods.

The app is also able to track such things as class attendance, sleep habits and physical activity, all without needing any overt user input.

The app, when used with ongoing self-reports by the students, proved capable of producing a prediction of their GPA that closely matched their cumulative GPA as reported in their transcripts, researchers said.

The app works with no prior knowledge of a student's academic performance, SAT scores or IQ, they noted.

"College life is complex," says Campbell.

"Students have to balance going to classes and performing well academically with competing demands for their time and energy, but there is no general agreement on why students with similar academic capability at the same institution do better or worse than one another," he says.

Still, the findings provided by SmartGPA contained few surprises, the researchers reported; students with higher GPAs studied more as the academic term progressed, limited their social activities during the evening, and experienced the highest levels of stress during midterm examinations.

The SmartGPA app could possibly help students improve their academic performance by allowing them to check their individual behaviors and see if they are leading to the desired GPA, the researchers suggested. A PDF of the initial StudentLife study the app used as a springboard can be seen here.