Running head: ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION1

Analyzing Student Preferences in Course

Selection

Kshitij Gupta, Shovan Swain

IIIT Hyderabad
ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 2

Analyzing Student Preferences in Course

Selection
Abstract

After completing a set of core courses, undergraduate students are required to

select elective courses. These courses are to be chosen for the semester following the
second year. The students are provided with a list of courses ranging across several
fields, like Humanities, Engineering, Computer Science, Science, etc. The decision
making process behind this course selection is a complex and difficult one. In this study,
we aim to understand the preferences of students’ while choosing courses. This study
also aims to see how different groups of students have similar preferences while choosing
courses.

In this study, we have used a grounded theory approach, where there is no prior
hypothesis and we build a theory based on the data. We conducted a quantitative
survey of undergradutate students to understand about the courses they can take and
to understand where there priorities lie.

Purpose

Following the completion of core courses in UG1 and UG2, undergraduate

students are given the choice of selecting their own courses for the subsequent
semesters. This process is a very integral one in the student’s time in the institute. And
as a result students consider several aspects before choosing their courses. There are
various factors that go into making the decision. Some of these factors can be timing,
attendance policy, course syllabus, assignment frequency among others. There is a lot of
data present in the scenario and we aim at analysing this data to understand students’
behavior by analyising their course selection preferences. In the later part of the paper,
we suggest an optimal course structure to the students based on their needs. This
suggestion is done through a simple algorithm that takes into account some very basic
needs of the student.
ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 3

Procedure

We have used a grounded theory approach, where we started the survey with an
aim to understand students’ course picking behavior without any prior hypothesis. We
chose a survey based approach where the participants where presented with a set of 6
questions (apart from basic information questions). The survey is divided into two
parts. Part 1 deals with attributing courses so that the suggestion engine has enough
data to go with. Part 2 deals with taking the students’ personal preferences so that
further analysis can be done. A set of 13 courses (out of the total 55 offered in one
semester) ranging across all fields Engineering, Humanities, Science, Math, CS were
taken into consideration.

Part I

Part 1 involves getting data about the courses from the UG4/5 students who have
already taken that course. They were presented with a list of the 13 courses mentioned
above and were asked to rate these courses based on two attributes, Attendance
Strictness and Workload on a scale of 1 to 5.

Part II

Part 2 involves getting data about the students’ preferences. They were presented
with four questions that they had to answer on a scale of 1 to 5.

Questions

• Basic Information - Batch, Gender, CGPA

• Part 1 - Course Attribution

Which of the courses have you taken and how would you rate their :

1. Attendance Strictness (1 being very lenient, 5 being very strict)

2. Workload (1 being almost nothing, 5 being really intense)

• Part 2 - Preference and Priorities

ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 4

1. How would like your course’s attendance policy to be? (1 being very lenient
and 5 being very strict)

2. How would like your course’s workload to be? (1 being very less and 5 being
a lot)

3. How important is Attendance, as a factor while choosing a course, to you?

(1-5)

4. How important is Workload, as a factor while choosing a course, to you?

(1-5)

Results

Course Attribution

Out of the N=25 participants, a majority of them were from UG3, so they
couldn’t give information about the courses. The rest of the students (14) gave
information about an average of 5 courses each. This gave us a sparsely populated
13x14 matrix. Running an inter-rater reliability test on this gave a Krippendorff’s
Alpha[1] of 0.779. Usually, a Krippendorff’s Alpha of 0.8 is considered to be reliable.
However, in some cases a Krippendorff’s Alpha of 0.66 is also considered as the
benchmark for reliability. In this case, since the matrix is sparsely populated, we don’t
have sufficient data to test the reliability. Thus a Krippendorff’s Alpha of 0.779 shows
that the course attributes are in fact reliable.

Student Preferences

Several tests were done with this data. For each student, we had 6 pieces of
information. The batch, gender, and their 4 preferences. These 4 set of preferences shall
be referred to as AP (Attendance Policy), WA (Workload Policy), AA (Attendance
Affinity) and WA (Workload Affinity) from now on.

T-Tests. First, we ran T-Tests[2] on all 4 parameters across the 2 genders. The
results are as follows:
ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 5

AP (M) AP (F)

Mean 2.11 2.625

Variance 1.044 0.484

Hypothesized Mean Difference 0

df 23

T-Statistic -1.22

P-Value 0.235

T-Test for AP among Male and Female Participants

WP (M) WP (F)

Mean 3.05 3.375

Variance 0.8788 1.484

Hypothesized Mean Difference 0

df 23

T-Statistic -0.68

P-Value 0.5014

T-Test for WP among Male and Female Participants

AA (M) AA (F)

Mean 3.17 2.25

Variance 1.204 0.6875

Hypothesized Mean Difference 0

df 23

T-Statistic 2.033

P-Value 0.05

T-Test for AA among Male and Female Participants

ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 6

WA (M) WA (F)

Mean 4.0 4.25

Variance 1.204 0.9375

Hypothesized Mean Difference 0

df 23

T-Statistic -0.553

P-Value 0.585

T-Test for WA among Male and Female Participants

As we can see, except for AA, the rest of the three parameters don’t have any
significant P-Values.
Correlation. We also calculated the pearson correlation[3] between CG and the
4 parameters of the individual.

Pearson Correlation Coeff P-Value

AP 0.3739 0.0656

WP 0.3837 0.058

AA -0.854 5.316e-08

WA -0.014 0.995

Pearson Correlation coeffecients and their respective P-Values

As we can see, AA has very high negative correlation with the CG of a student.
Basic Statistical Tests. We measured the mean of each of the four
parameters. We also meaured the frequency of elements in each of these parameters.

Mean Frequency Array [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Element with Maximum Frequency

AP 2.28 [4, 14, 4, 2, 1] 2

WP 3.16 [2, 5, 6, 11, 1] 4

AA 2.88 [3, 6, 9, 5, 2] 3

WP 4.08 [0, 4, 0, 11, 10] 4

Mean and Frequencies

ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 7

Clustering. We divided each parameter into two sections, Low ( < 3) and High
( >= 3 ). With such a division across all parameters, we got 16 clusters. The division of
students into their respective clusters is as follows:

Cluster [AP, WP, AA, WA] CGs of students in Cluster

LLHH [5.66, 6.54, 6.78, 7.23, 8.62]

LHHH [6.34, 6.45, 7.33, 7.45, 7.98, 8.02, 8.39, 8.76]

LHHL [7.33]

LHLL [7.87, 9.73]

HHHH [8.21]

HHLH [8.38, 8.45, 9.67]

LHLH [8.56, 9.34]

HLHH [8.56]

HLLH [8.72]

HHLL [9.23]

Course Prediction

The participant was presented with a suitable course by using the surveyed course
attributes and personal preferences. We used weighted mean square error between each
of the course attributes and participant preferences with the respective affinities as
weights to predict the most suitable course. The percentage of satisfied participants was
used as the accuracy of our course prediction method. We find out that 72% (18/25) of
the participants were satisfied with the predicted course.

Qualitative Analysis

In regards to our Qualitative study, we wanted to explore other factors which

affect student’s course selection by conducting a face-to-face interview. There is no
perfectly structured questionnaire here as we modelled the further questions on our
findings from the previous answers. Please find the scenarios below:
ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 8

Case Study 1

A UG4 CSD student working in the Computer Vision Lab was interviewed and we
received the following responses:

• Q1. What are the main factors you consider to select an elective
course?
I think the main factor behind selecting a course is interest. But there are mostly
very few courses I have a deep interest in. Then, I have to consider other factors
which are either the importance of them in the future or, if not importance,
factors like workload or grading which can help me get good grades.

• Q2. What factors do you consider if you don’t have a deep interest in
the course type?
I consider various factors which help me to have either a deeper knowledge in the
subjects I have to follow after graduation or have good grades which help me in
the same. For example, I took Linear Algebra as an elective because It will help
me a lot in my research work in the future. And also, I took Databases course
becuase various resources like sample question papers were available with the
seniors and helped me a lot to get better grades. Then there are other factors like
the workload, which help me focus more on all the subjects.

• Q3. Which courses have been your favourite and why?

I don’t have any favourite courses in particular, but I’ve had keen interest in
Digital Logic Processing, Data Structures and Algorithms to name a few.
Although these courses have had a very intensive workload, my interest in the
subject could compensate for the same. Other than these courses, I have a
somewhat neutral interest in all the other courses except for a few science courses.

• Q4. Which courses have been the easiest for you and why?
I think Databases and Computer Programming have been the easiest courses for
me because I was already ahead of the Computer Programming class as I had
ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 9

studied most of the concepts in school already. Otherwise, Databases was one of
the easiest courses, because I was able to score good marks without much effort
with the last year resources available with the seniors.

The study revealed that interest in course type is a significant factor behind
course selection, but that is true for selective course types. For other electives, Students
consider factors to help them get better grades or have a deeper knowledge in their
specific stream of study. The presence of other unconventional factors like past year
resource availability were revealed which further affect the student’s decision. After the
discussions, we realized that the complex phenomenon of decision making behind course
selection can not be completely reduced to some quantifiable factors, and is also
dependent on other latent variables which are unique for all students.

Conclusions

As we can see from the T-Tests conducted on the parameters, there is a significant
difference between the way females prioritize attendance and the way males prioritize
attendance.
Analysis of the Pearson Correlation coefficients tells us that there is a significant
negative correlation between CGPA and Attendance Affinity of a student. A reason for
this could be that attendance is not a factor that they consider while choosing courses.
This may be because they perform well in a course irrespective of the attendance policy.
As usual, there are certain outliers in our dataset, but the strong correlation shows that
this is a general trend.
By looking at the most frequent elements in each of the parameters, we notice
that the most frequent in AP is 2 whereas the most frequent in WP is 4, and both of
them, by a large margin. This goes to show that students prefer a heavier, more work
intensive course over a course which has strict attendance policy. Another interesting
pattern to be noted is the absence of any obvious high frequency element in AA. This is
so because of the significant correlation between CG and AA discussed earlier. Given
this correlation, we can say that since the CG of the students in this dataset doesn’t
ANALYZING STUDENT PREFERENCES IN COURSE SELECTION 10

have an obvious high frequency element, neither would AA.

Limitations

There are certain limitations in this research method that we have employed. The
first one being that the process of course selection is a huge task and takes into account
a plethora of factors. The second limitation is that acquiring data about courses and
about students gets increasingly difficult as we try to increase the number of parameters.

References

1. krippendorff, klaus. (2011). Computing Krippendorff’s Alpha-Reliability.

2. Kyun Kim, Tae. (2015). T test as a parametric statistic. Korean Journal of

Anesthesiology. 68. 540. 10.4097/kjae.2015.68.6.540.

3. Sedgwick Philip. Pearson’s correlation coefficient BMJ 2012; 345 :e4483