ANALYZING HISTORICAL DATA OF STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE FOR DETERMINING THE PERTINENCE OF TAKING OR NOT LEVELLING MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS COURSES

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) is a public university that applies an admission test for those students interested in one of their engineering programs, if a student is accepted, it performs another exam, called levelling exam which goal is determining if it has the basic knowledge of mathematics and physics. All engineering programs have a common group of core engineering subjects called the General Branch Level. Besides these topics, there are two subjects considered as levelling courses, whose goal is assuring that all students have a similar level of mathematics and physics concepts, so, they will be more successful with later and more advanced courses. An admitted student can exempt these two courses depending on its score in the levelling test, and can access directly to the next courses. However, it’s not clear if exempting these courses due to performance in the levelling exam allows a student having a good performance in later courses.

The levelling courses are Mathematics Workshop and Introduction to Physics, which main goal is levelling the students giving them the basic knowledge and concepts of mathematics and physics, so they can successfully study the next courses, especially Cinematic and Dynamic of a Particle, which is a basic physics course for more advanced topics.

It has been discussed if it is convenient or not that students exempt the levelling courses, or if it is necessary that all admitted students must take them. At UAM, studying these levelling courses means a trimester as an extra period of time that students must invest in finishing their studies and the positive effect of studying them or not has not been analyzed.

This work presents an analysis of historical data of students’ scores in the levelling courses using statistical and automatic learning techniques, for determining their impact in students’ performance in a later course, Cinematic and Dynamic of a Particle. For the study, are considered two groups: students that exempt the levelling courses and students that must study them. The goal of this work is determining if studying or exempting the levelling courses really has an impact in the performance in later courses. Results from this work would help to determine if the extra period of time needed for studying Mathematics Workshop and Introduction to Physics is improving students to success in later courses, or, if these courses are not relevant in levelling students, they could disappear from the engineering study plans.