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George Bradford

College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Arizona State's retention rate rose to 84 percent from 77 percent in recent years, a change that the provost credits largely to eAdvisor.
  • Mr. Lange and his colleagues had found that by the eighth day of class, they could predict, with 70-percent accuracy, whether a student would score a C or better. Mr. Lange built a system, rolled out in 2009, that sent professors frequently updated alerts about how well each student was predicted to do, based on course performance and online behavior.
  • Rio Salado knows from its database that students who hand in late assignments and don't log in frequently often fail or withdraw from a course. So the software is more likely to throw up a red flag for current students with those characteristics.
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  • And in a cautionary tale about technical glitches, the college began sharing grade predictions with students last summer, hoping to encourage those lagging behind to step up, but had to shut the alerts down in the spring. Course revisions had skewed the calculations, and some predictions were found to be inaccurate. An internal analysis found no increase in the number of students dropping classes. An improved system is promised for the fall.
  • His software borrows a page from Netflix. It melds each student's transcript with thousands of past students' grades and standardized-test scores to make suggestions. When students log into the online portal, they see 10 "Course Suggestions for You," ranked on a five-star scale. For, say, a health-and-human-performance major, kinesiology might get five stars, as the next class needed for her major. Physics might also top the list, to satisfy a science requirement in the core curriculum.
  • Behind those recommendations is a complex algorithm, but the basics are simple enough. Degree requirements figure in the calculations. So do classes that can be used in many programs, like freshman writing. And the software bumps up courses for which a student might have a talent, by mining their records—grades, high-school grade-point average, ACT scores—and those of others who walked this path before.
  • The software sifts through a database of hundreds of thousands of grades other students have received. It analyzes the historical data to figure out how much weight to assign each piece of the health major's own academic record in forecasting how she will do in a particular course. Success in math is strongly predictive of success in physics, for example. So if her transcript and ACT score indicate a history of doing well in math, physics would probably be recommended over biology, though both satisfy the same core science requirement.
  • Every year, students in Tennessee lose their state scholarships because they fall a hair short of the GPA cutoff, Mr. Denley says, a financial swing that "massively changes their likelihood of graduating."
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    July 18, 2012 College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers By Marc Parry Illustration by Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle Campuses are places of intuition and serendipity: A professor senses confusion on a student's face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife. Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance. As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths-it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone's class according to her understanding of the material.
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