This study was aimed at clarifying relations between the way students learn and personal, contextual and performance variables. Students from seven different academic disciplines completed the Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS). Besides, data about their age, gender, academic discipline, prior education and exam performance were gathered. Regression and correlations analyses were used to analyse the data. The results showed that students' learning patterns were indeed associated with personal and contextual factors such as academic discipline, prior education, age and gender, but that the different learning patterns had different sources. Second, students' learning patterns proved to explain an important part of the variance in their academic performance. However, the results also revealed that exams as usually used in the first years of higher education hardly capitalise on students' use of critical, analytical and concrete processing strategies.