Analyzing The Effect Of Bottleneck Courses On Time To Graduation

Curricular analytics is a field of study commonly used to study curricula within a university, or to create models that produce useful data about certain curricula. This thesis will investigate four different academic programs, two highly structured and two less structured, and apply basic techniques from curricular analytics to analyze whether the “bottleneck” courses — defined as one with three or more other courses directly or indirectly requiring it as a prerequisite – within the major are causing students to take longer than four years or change majors. We will answer the question of “Are the determined “bottleneck” courses the courses students are more likely to withdraw from or fail?”, and “Are students within a highly structured academic program with more “bottleneck” courses more likely to change majors?”