May 30, 2008

Colleges Mine Data to Predict Dropouts

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Computer analysis seeks to identify students at risk

When students log into the course Web site for Purdue University's freshman biology laboratory class, they see an image of a traffic light. Green means they're doing well, yellow means they're faltering, and red means they might fail.

So who's the traffic cop?

It's not the professor, and it's not the teaching assistants. Rather, it's a sophisticated computer algorithm that predicts when students are at risk of failing,