Evaluation of Study Plans using Partial Orders

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to evaluate study plan deviations by modeling course sequences as partial orders, accommodating flexible course schedules and distinguishing between intended and actual student behaviors.

Contribution

It proposes a novel partial order alignment approach to detect deviations in study plans, accounting for flexible course offerings and different interpretations of course attempts.

Findings

Effective detection of deviations in real university data

Less sensitivity to course offering schedules

Distinguishing intended vs. actual course behavior

Abstract

In higher education, data is collected that indicate the term(s) that a course is taken and when it is passed. Often, study plans propose a suggested course order to students. Study planners can adjust these based on detected deviations between the proposed and actual order of the courses being taken. In this work, we detect deviations by combining (1) the deviation between the proposed and actual course order with (2) the temporal difference between the expected and actual course-taking term(s). Partially ordered alignments identify the deviations between the proposed and actual order. We compute a partial order alignment by modeling a study plan as a process model and a student's course-taking behavior as a partial order. Using partial orders in such use cases allows one to relax the constraints of strictly ordered traces. This makes our approach less prone to the order in which courses are offered. Further, when modeling course-taking behavior as partial orders, we propose distinguishing intended course-taking behavior from actual course-passing behavior of students by including either all terms in which a course is attempted or only the term that a course is passed, respectively. This provides more perspectives when comparing the proposed and actual course-taking behavior. The proposed deviation measuring approach is evaluated on real-life data from RWTH Aachen University.