Is your Statement Purposeless? Predicting Computer Science Graduation Admission Acceptance based on Statement Of Purpose

TL;DR

This paper introduces a machine learning system that predicts Computer Science graduate admission acceptance based on Statement of Purpose quality, achieving high accuracy and aiding applicants in evaluating their SOPs.

Contribution

It presents a novel predictive model using SVM trained on SOP features, demonstrating the effectiveness of word embeddings and document similarity features.

Findings

Achieved 92% accuracy with SVM classifier.

Word embedding and document similarity features outperform other features.

Potential deployment as a web service for applicants.

Abstract

We present a quantitative, data-driven machine learning approach to mitigate the problem of unpredictability of Computer Science Graduate School Admissions. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of a system which may help prospective applicants evaluate their Statement of Purpose (SOP) based on our system output. We, then, identify feature sets which can be used to train a predictive model. We train a model over fifty manually verified SOPs for which it uses an SVM classifier and achieves the highest accuracy of 92% with 10-fold cross-validation. We also perform experiments to establish that Word Embedding based features and Document Similarity-based features outperform other identified feature combinations. We plan to deploy our application as a web service and release it as a FOSS service.