Attribution theory implies that situational variables or personal dispositions influence a person's inferences about the cause-effect relationship of an event. That is, the degree of a person's ascription of his success or failure to one of antecedents like strategy, ability, effort or external factors would be affected by the situational cues such as the evaluation system or his own dispositional tendency, particularly ones such as self-concept. The theory also suggests that a person's causal attribution would determine the strength, quality, or direction of one's performance and motivation. During the past several decades, empirical evidence supporting the theory has been accumulated. However, most of these studies employed very strict experimental designs with manipulated and artificial settings. Thus, this study attempted to apply the theory to a practical setting and it was hypothesized that the degree of students' attribution to certain factors would have relations with the change of evaluation system from norm-referenced to criterion-reference evaluation and with the degree of positive self-concept. It was also hypothesized that students' attributions and self-concepts would in turn have effects on their next academic achievement. For this study, 101 college female students served as subjects and responded on a causal attribution questionnaire consisting of questions about the attribution of their academic success or failure for the prior semester before and after the evaluation system changed. A self-concept inventory was also administered to these subjects and their academic achievement in grade points was recorded. To investigate the relationship of the evaluation system and the self-concept with attribution, two-way ANOVAs with a repeated measure on one factor (evaluation system) were conducted on each attributional antecedent. To examine the effects of the attribution and the self-concept on academic achievement, two-way ANOVAs were conducted on the difference of grade points before and after attribution responses. The results of this study showed that under norm-referenced evaluation, students tended to attribute their failure more to inappropriate strategy and less to lack of ability than they did under criterion-referenced evaluation. They also demonstrated that students with a high positive self-concept tended to attribute their failure less to lack of ability and inappropriate strategy than those with a low positive self-concept did. This study found the positive effects of self-concept and attribution of failure to lack of effort and negative effects of attribution of failure to lack of ability on academic achievement.