Abstract:

Mexican Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco (UAM-A) has an issue related with the time their students need for finishing their studies. It is expected, according the study programs, that a student must finish its studies in twelve scholar periods, a scholar period is a quarter (three months) with three quarters per year, meaning that these twelve scholar periods represents four years.

However, the average of those students that end their studies is near 21 quarters (seven years) which mean almost twice the time needed for finishing. The amount of students that ends in the expected four years is very small, and there are not few cases, when students needed thirty or more scholar periods (ten years or more).

All engineering programs, ten at UAM-A, are composed by different groups of courses called “branches”, these are: Leveling, General, Professional, Multidisciplinary and Consolidation.

It is known that the General group of courses is the one in which more of the students fail in their studies (not necessarily the one that needs more time to be finished) , however, an analysis for determining the average time needed for each one could offer a clearer view of the behavior of the students and determining if one of these groups.

This work presents the analysis of the time needed for the students of the ten different Engineering programs at UAM-A for showing which one of then is representing more difficulty for students. Also it has to be considered the way in which students take the courses, at UAM-A, students has a lot of liberty for choosing the moment in which they take a course, this also can affect the time needed.

For this analysis, were considered nearly 5000 students that are still studying, the expected time for each period is taken from the official plans. A deep statistical analysis is performed for showing different features like: time needed for different group of courses or information of those students that left one course of the first groups until the end of their studies. Results are presented using different graphs according the Information Visualization area of knowledge that help people understand information presenting it in a visual way that simplifies its comprehension.

This work is part of a more ambitious project related with the creation of a dashboard that can present a lot of information with different depth levels for showing a lot of aspects about the behavior of the students over a study program.

Results from this work can help to identify those “branches” where students are having more problems and in consequence take the appropriate actions for lessen this impact.

Keywords:

Student performance, courses effect over students, learning analytics, issues in education.