Abstract:

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have study plans which specify the topics its students must approve for obtaining the necessary knowledge across their professional education. These programs are divided according periods of time (semesters, quarters, etc.) that compose the study plan. Ideally, if a student follows the topics per period established in a study plan, could finish its studies in the established time, however this it's not very common, so the students finished their studies in a longer period.

One of the problems in HEI is that students don't finish their studies in the time established in the study plan. Many reasons can cause this phenomena, like personal, family, labor between many others, and there are several studies on effects and impact. However, it's not considered that a study plan affects the performance on student achievement, so we are interesting in studying the distribution of subjects over the plan in order to help to determine if a study plan affects or not the performance and finishing time of a student during its studies.

In order to perform this kind of study, a criteria for evaluating the performance of a student must be considered, for this work, a view considering the grade obtained for each approved topic during a certain period and the amount of credits of that topic is considered, this is the main contribution of the Grade Point Average (GPA). This is performed in schools which final grade it's not a number, but a letter.

The goal of this work is to obtain a relationship between the performance of students in a Mexican university for students in the Computing Engineering program, with the distribution of studied topics in each one of the periods (in this case, quarters) they performed during its professional studies. The performance is considered like the number of quarters in which she/he finished the undergraduate studies. The relationship will be based in the GPA obtained for each student in a certain scholar period.

Different sets of students are analyzed, the best (considering global average and studies finishing time), and the ones which has the least progress in their studies. This will allow to determine if the distribution of topics per quarter is adequate.

This work uses some Data Mining (DM) techniques and apply the concepts of Educational Data Mining (EDM), a branch of DM which goal is to generate information that allows to improve educative processes.

The information that it is analyzed correspond to the academic record (known as kardex in the university) of students which may or not finished their studies, a period of 3 years is analyzed. Something to remark it is that during this period of time, the Computing Engineering has suffered at least two modifications of its study plan, so a comparison between the effect of the different versions of the plan would be interesting, this periods are from 2003 to 2006 for the first plan and from 2013 to 2016.

A similarity between the way the topics are presented in the plan and the way the students takes them will be performed, this using correlation techniques. The obtained results allows to determine if the distribution of topics over a study plan are affecting the performance of the students, so it becomes a problem for finishing their studies in a suitable period of time.

Keywords:

Curricula design, educational data mining, grade point average, study plans improvement.