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The internationalisation of Higher Education is broadly seen as a positive development. It is a process that is said to contribute to intercultural skills acquisition, which is deemed crucial in today's globalised society. Yet, research has shown that the benefits of being confronted with other ideas and viewpoints can get lost in translation due to different languages and academic cultures. We set out to explore the impact of the international classroom on study success and argue that there might be an optimum level of internationalisation. Based on a dataset that includes more than 2822 GPA scores for 836 students from four first-year cohorts of an international Bachelor in European Studies, we find strong empirical evidence that students' study success is lower when there are few (below 3) or many (above 6) different nationalities in the classroom. We find the strongest effects of internationalisation for students who regularly attend class (i.e. 80-90%). Hence, we present strong evidence that internationalisation has a both a negative and a positive impact on students' study success but students will only experience these beneficial and detrimental effects of learning in an international environment when they attend class.

The literature on first-year study success has identified a host of factors that may affect a student's chances of succeeding, ranging from personal circumstances to educational environment. One of the factors that often emerges in this context is (non-)attendance of classes, lectures and tutorials. Intuitively, one would expect this to be all the more important in programmes that employ a student-centred and interactive approach to learning, such as problem-based learning. Interestingly, there is little dedicated research that looks into the importance of (non-)attendance in such a learning environment. This article addresses this gap in the literature by looking at the effect of (non-)attendance on the study success of three cohorts of Maastricht University's Bachelor in European Studies (annual intake of 325-350 students). Controlling for a range of factors, we find that attendance matters for several measures of study success and also for the committed and participating student.