Traditionally, students from higher training cycle and upper secondary school education access higher technical education with a wide range of access marks in each group. The purpose of this article is to analyse how students’ backgrounds and access marks really influence their success in the first academic year and further evolution to obtain the degree of Technical Architecture. To achieve this aim, the progress of students from different backgrounds was analysed for three academic years from 2002/2003 to 2004/2005 prior to the implementation of a curriculum adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), so that the curriculum change does not introduce noise in the data. That involves 983 students in this study. Moreover, most students in the new curriculum have not completed all the courses. It was found that, once students had completed the first semester, a selection stage in the studies that were analysed, their background did not influence their performance. However, it was also found that the access mark influenced both the mark for the selection stage and academic performance until completion of the degree.

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