Many Colleges of Business are selective in who they admit into their degree programs. This selectivity is often due to a desire to have those students who are admitted successfully complete the program. While a number of different screening mechanisms might be employed, a common screening mechanism is to use performance in either all or a preselected set of freshman and\or sophomore courses as the screening mechanism.

Due to the use of this method, the validity and efficacy of this mechanism through to senior level courses should be of interest to policy makers.  In an investigation of how well performance in freshman and sophomore courses translates into performance in later courses, this paper examines how well performance in a senior-level capstone Strategic Management course can be predicted by performance in required freshman and sophomore courses.  Among the results it was surprisingly found that the need to take a refresher mathematics course (college algebra) was a significant predictor of performance.