Optimal Academic Plan Derived from Articulation Agreements: A Preliminary Experiment on Human-Generated and (Hypothetical) Algorithm-Generated Academic Plans

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Nguyen, David V., Doroudi, Shayan, Epstein, Daniel A.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Nguyen, David V.
Doroudi, Shayan
Epstein, Daniel A.
author_facet Nguyen, David V.
Doroudi, Shayan
Epstein, Daniel A.
contents Our preliminary experiment examined a potential pain point with ASSIST, California's database of articulation agreements. That pain point is cross-referencing multiple articulation agreements to manually develop an optimal academic plan. Optimal is defined as the minimal set of community college courses that satisfy all transfer requirements for the multiple universities a student is preparing to apply to. Accordingly, we designed a low-fidelity prototype that lists the minimal set of courses a hypothetical optimization algorithm would output based on selected articulation agreements. 24 students were tasked with creating an optimal academic plan using either ASSIST (which requires manual optimization) or the optimization prototype (which already provides the minimal set of classes). Prototype users had less optimality mistakes, were faster, and provided higher usability ratings compared to ASSIST users. Going forward, future research needs to move beyond our proof of value of a hypothetical optimization algorithm and towards actually implementing an algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_04500
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Academic Plan Derived from Articulation Agreements: A Preliminary Experiment on Human-Generated and (Hypothetical) Algorithm-Generated Academic Plans
Nguyen, David V.
Doroudi, Shayan
Epstein, Daniel A.
Human-Computer Interaction
Our preliminary experiment examined a potential pain point with ASSIST, California's database of articulation agreements. That pain point is cross-referencing multiple articulation agreements to manually develop an optimal academic plan. Optimal is defined as the minimal set of community college courses that satisfy all transfer requirements for the multiple universities a student is preparing to apply to. Accordingly, we designed a low-fidelity prototype that lists the minimal set of courses a hypothetical optimization algorithm would output based on selected articulation agreements. 24 students were tasked with creating an optimal academic plan using either ASSIST (which requires manual optimization) or the optimization prototype (which already provides the minimal set of classes). Prototype users had less optimality mistakes, were faster, and provided higher usability ratings compared to ASSIST users. Going forward, future research needs to move beyond our proof of value of a hypothetical optimization algorithm and towards actually implementing an algorithm.
title Optimal Academic Plan Derived from Articulation Agreements: A Preliminary Experiment on Human-Generated and (Hypothetical) Algorithm-Generated Academic Plans
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04500