Many factors have been identified to influence academic performance whether positively or negatively.But for the purpose of this article only Six (6) of these factors will be considered, they include: 1)Socio-demographic characteristics, 2)Socio-economic status, 3)Past academic performance, 4)Environment, 5)Psychological factors and 6)Study skills. The variables under these factors can broadly be grouped into modifiable and non modifiable variables. The non modifiable variables consist mainly of gender, ethnicity and age while majority of the variables like parental education and income, school facilities and characteristics, appropriate role models and orientation, learning approach and time management can all be grouped under modifiable variables. The modifiable variables are those variables which when effectively manipulated can give the expected/desired influence on academic performance.Socio-demographic characteristics consist of the student's age, gender, marital status and ethnicity. Age plays a significant role on academic performance as younger students tend to perform better than their older counterparts. Females performing better than males in their medical training had been a consistent finding in literature. The effect of ethnic minority status on academic performance may be actually due to the influence of socio-economic status.Socio-economic status can be defined as " a person's overall social position to which attainment in both social and economic domain contribute but when it is used in studies of school academic achievement, it refers to socio-economic status of parents and family. The social and economic component of socio-economic status may have separate influence on educational outcome. SES entails parent's occupation and income, parents educational attainment/level and family structure/size. Children from low SES families are more likely to have, difficulties with their studies, lower levels of literacy and display negative attitudes to school. In other words, your educational success depends very strongly on the socio-economics status of your parents.Some studies have shown that the only ready prediction of future performance is past performance. Self concept of one's performance in the past (positive rating) are well correlated with better academic achievement. Previous academic performance serves as a good predictor of success especially in the student's first year in college.Environment refers to those natural conditions and circumstances affecting a person's life. It can also be seen as the external conditions affecting life. The physical components, that is the school structures (Lecture halls, etc), school types (private, public and home school ) and the individual's past environment (where he/she was brought up) can also be considered as variables under environmental factor. Some studies found no statistical significant difference between any of the school types (private, public etc), however, school facilities, school size and characteristics obviously have significant effect on students' and teachers' ability to perform as supported by many studies across the world. Psychological factors include those variables that affect the state of mind and its process. Motivation (Orientation), sleep and perceived stress are all psychological variables which have effect on academic performance. Parents may have low income and low status occupation for example but nevertheless transmit high education aspirations to their children. Lack of appropriate role model, orientation and aspiration of peer affect individual effort and achievement in school. Study skills covers both motivation for learning and process by which the students approaches the task of learning. This involves three learning processes i.e. making links across material, searching for a deeper understanding of the material and looking for general principles. Awareness and practice of learning approaches, attendance to lectures and time management are variables under study skills. Ineffective study habits, common among professional student, is one of the potential causes of inadequate students performanceFrom my own study, of the influence of these six factors, using data collected from pre-med and pre-clinical students of Nnamdi Azikiwe University in south-east Nigeria via self administered questionnaire, surprisingly I found out that these factors actually had varying effects on their academic performances. For example, majority of respondents 76.7% had knowledge of certain study skills, 64.2% had no form of orientation, 59.5% had positive perception of stress and 43.7% reported that the environment had negative impact on their academic performance. The survey analysis showed that 72.1% of respondents' parents/sponsors had tertiary education and it was found to have an association with their academic performance with P-value of 0.001(P 0.05). Hence, statistically socio-economic status in the form of parents/sponsors educational attainment was found to have major significant effect on the students' performance compared with some of the other factors like environmental influence and perceived stress which both had no significant effect on their academic performance. Though some researchers found out in their own studies that environment had significant effect on students' academic performance.Most students are constantly faced with these factors being uninformed and unprepared to meet with these challenges, to which they succumb to, with the resultant effect of poor academic performance. To ensure that academic performance of students remains optimum, it is imperative that influence of these factors on students' performance be sort and kept on check. Families advantaged socially, educationally and economically foster high level of achievement in their children and may as well provide psychological support for their children through environment that encourage the development of skills necessary for success at school. Studies have been done on different variables that affect academic performance with the effect of Socio-demographic characteristics, Past academic performance, Socio-economic status, Environment, Psychological factors and Study skills varying irrespective of the population under study. Therefore individuals (students), parents, schools, communities, policy makers and governments should make concerted effort in harnessing the positive effects of these factor to enhance students' academic performance.(Adapted from "FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AMONG PRE-MEDICAL STUDENTS OF NNAMDI AZIKIWE UNIVERSITY " an unpublished research paper authored by Nwatah Vincent Ebuka)0.05)>