Predicting Students Drop Out: A Case Study

The monitoring and support of university freshmen is considered very important at many educational institutions. In this paper we describe the results of the educational data mining case study aimed at predicting the Electrical Engineering (EE) students drop out after the first semester of their studies or even before they enter the study program as well as identifying success-factors specific to the EE program. Our experimental results show that rather simple and intuitive classifiers (decision trees) give a useful result with accuracies between 75 and 80%. Besides, we demonstrate the usefulness of cost-sensitive learning and thorough analysis of misclassifications, and show a few ways of further prediction improvement without having to collect additional data about the students. Attributes in the pre-university dataset are appended. (Contains 4 tables and 1 footnote.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (2nd, Cordoba, Spain, July 1-3, 2009)," see ED539041.]