Analysis and visualization of performance indicators in university admission tests

Natilli M., Fadda D., Rinzivillo S., Pedreschi D., Licari F.

Cluster analysis  Performance evaluation  University entrance tests 

This paper presents an analytical platform for evaluation of the performance and anomaly detection of tests for admission to public universities in Italy. Each test is personalized for each student and is composed of a series of questions, classified on different domains (e.g. maths, science, logic, etc.). Since each test is unique for composition, it is crucial to guarantee a similar level of difficulty for all the tests in a session. For this reason, to each question, it is assigned a level of difficulty from a domain expert. Thus, the general difficultness of a test depends on the correct classification of each item. We propose two approaches to detect outliers. A visualization-based approach using dynamic filter and responsive visual widgets. A data mining approach to evaluate the performance of the different questions for five years. We used clustering to group the questions according to a set of performance indicators to provide labeling of the data-driven level of difficulty. The measured level is compared with the a priori assigned by experts. The misclassifications are then highlighted to the expert, who will be able to refine the ques- tion or the classification. Sequential pattern mining is used to check if biases are present in the composition of the tests and their performance. This analysis is meant to exclude overlaps or direct dependencies among questions. Analyzing co-occurrences we are able to state that the compo- sition of each test is fair and uniform for all the students, even on several sessions. The analytical results are presented to the expert through a visual web application that loads the analytical data and indicators and composes an interactive dashboard. The user may explore the patterns and models extracted by filtering and changing thresholds and analytical parameters.

Source: Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops, edited by Emil Sekerinski et al..., pp. 186–199, 2019

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