Mining Retention Rules from Student Transcripts: A Case Study of the Information Systems programme at a Federal University

Abstract

Due to the increase in inflows, mainly because of REUNI procedures, and low completion rate also observed in several programmes on Brazilian uni- versities, it is necessary to identify which factors may cause the students to re- main in their programmes longer than expected or even leaving the university before their conclusion. In this work, we hypothesize that the combinations of classes that the students have to do in each semester is not appropriated and can cause student retention, leading to a huge loss to the university. Thus, we present a case study of analyzing retention rules in the Information Systems pro- gramme at the Federal University of Bahia. With the resulting rule set obtained from mined student transcripts, we discuss how changes can be made in a pro- gramme so as to decrease the student retention rates.