Abstract:

One of the most important changes in the new regulation of the University Grades introduced in Europe, called “The Bologna Plan”, is the obligation of the students to attend to class.
The reason is that, between others, the presence in class is an important factor in the academic performance of the students.
Before the introduction of the Bologna Plan a survey was conducted in ESIC Business & Marketing School in order to analyze the causes of absenteeism.
Different focus groups of students and teachers were created in order to design a questionnaire that included information regarding courses, age, and gender in order to create a profile of the student, and 78 items that tried to give an answer to the following question: In which measure the following elements influence in your decision of NO assisting to class. That’s to say, I decide not to assist to class because…
After the analysis of the results using 460 valid answers, it was detected that only a few of them were statistically important regarding the explanation of the causes of absenteeism.
In order to make a new survey after the introduction of the Bologna Plan it was clear the necessity of a variable reduction. This research gives the results of the variable reduction proposed after analyzing the responses using Principal Component Analysis.
Also the analysis can help to create a profile of the students in order to help the University to decrease the abseentism in the classroom.
The idea is to leave only the items more important in the new survey, taking into account comparability of the results with the previous analysis, but creating a questionnaire that can be answered quicker, more easily and with less noise in the statistical output due to the reduction of the number of variables.

Keywords:

Abseentism, Bologna Plan.