Evaluating University Admissions Qualifications

Software	Language with good database handling, one or more database management systems
Covers	IS development, database interactions, simple statistics
Skills Required	Programming, understanding of databases, ideally some interest in statistics and/or data analytics.
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ???? Programming ???

Brief Description

Faced with applicants taking a plethora of different entrance qualifications, university admissions tutors (notably at De Montfort University) find it extremely difficult to predict who is likely to do well at university. It is a constant source of concern to universities that they might (without realising it) be making offers demanding different standards of attainment to applicants doing different qualifications, such as A Levels, Scottish Highers, Advanced GNVQs, BTEC National Diplomas, International Baccalaureates and so on. This can easily result in a university rejecting or losing students who are smarter and have achieved more at school than other students whom the university happily accepts. It can also result in a university accepting students whose achievements at school should have shown that they are not up to the job. (When members of the DMU School of Computing have manually mapped entry qualifications to results, they have found the results very revealing, but doing it is very hard work.)

This situation would be alleviated by an information system that compared the examination and course module results obtained by a university's students with their examination results at school, and reported average university module grades, proportion of fails, and so on, for students with different school qualifications and grades. This system should be designed so that there is a clear separation between the interface, the statistical information handling and report generation, and the database interactions, so that the system can be connected to different databases without altering its core content.

Extensions

At DMU both school course grades and university course grades are held in databases, but in different ones. A system that would actually be (very) useful to the university would need to access both databases and treat them as a joint database. However for security reasons DMU won't allow you access to real databases with real student data.

The system would be even more useful if it calculated more sophisticated statistics than just averages and failure rates. Consider what other statistics and types of report would be useful, and implement them. How could they best be displayed graphically to reveal their significance? You might want to connect the system to a commercial statistics package.

While university teachers and administrators believe strongly that they shouldn't reject better applicants to accept worse because of their ethnic or social backgrounds, they are aware that intelligent candidates from underprivileged backgrounds can have lower grades than they would have obtained at better schools in more supportive environments. But making appropriate (rather than inappropriate) allowance for this is very hard. Can you extend your system to include potentially significant social information?

Cross-Reference

I've also proposed a similar-looking project entitled Intelligent Advisory System for University Admissions. The difference is that the Intelligent Advisory System project is intended as an AI project, developing skills in designing and building rule-based reasoning systems, while this project is an information systems project where the scope for sophistication lies in the generation of statistical analyses of data and in handling complex databases. You might like to think of it as a system that could provide the evidence to support the rules used in the intelligent system proposed in the other project.

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