Abstract:

Nowadays, processing and analyzing data has become a milestone activity in several fields, and the educational environment is not an exception. Bachelor degree level institutions perform studies using their students’ data looking for patterns for making decisions about different topics and problems.

One of the main research topics in educational institutions is related to academic performance, looking for factors that could affect this one. These factors are mainly related to personal characteristics, interest, motivation or other factors in the process of taking a bachelor degree. However, at the moment that a student is accepted into a university, he has characteristics and knowledge obtained through his previous studies, factors that can contribute to his academic performance.

In each admission process, the Mexican Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco (UAM-A) accepts hundreds of students from several high school institutions in each one of its ten programs of the Basic Sciences and Engineering Division. It is of interest to the university knowing if the school of origin has an impact on the students’ performance asking questions like: is there a school whose students have a better performance? Is there one whose students tend to fail in their bachelor studies? Also, considering that institutions change over the years due to several factors, students from a school that had the best performance ten years ago, maybe actually their students are having more problems for finishing their studies. For this reason, it is an interesting topic to analyze their evolution of academic performance.

This work presents a historical analysis of the academic performance of engineering students considering their school of origin. Academic performance is analyzed considering if the student: is still studying, did not finish, or finished their studies. For this, a period of time of eight years was considered, a year includes two admission periods. For this analysis were applied the concepts of information visualization, which goal is processing and presenting data in a graphical way which makes it more understandable that in a textual way.

Any visualization is created for answering a question; in this work, we considered the next questions:
- How is the evolution of students from different schools considering their average and marks in the admission test?
- Which high school has a bigger proportion of students for each Engineering program? How is their performance?
- Is there a relationship between the high school of origin and finishing or failing in bachelor degree studies?

To answer these questions were generated different graphics, including bubble plot and cloudline plot that relates the generation class and the school of origin, and high school studies with academic performance, and other features.

The results of this work could help the university to identify those students which according to their school of origin would have a greater risk of not finishing their studies in order to support them in the process of training a successful professional. Also, observing from which schools are those students which obtain better results, could represent a possible criteria at the moment of selecting students for entering university. The results are an initial stage for a deeper study using statistical or automatic learning techniques at the moment of processing and analyzing the data

Keywords:

Academic performance, educational analytics, impact of the school of origin, students’ historical analysis, relation between admission and academic performance.