Planning Courses for Student Success at the American College of Greece

Abstract

We are concerned with the personalized student course plan (PSCP) problem of optimizing the plan of courses students at the American College of Greece will need to take to complete their studies. We model the constraints set forth by the institution so that we guarantee the validity of all produced plans. We formulate several different objectives to optimize the resulting plan, including the fastest completion time, course difficulty balance, and maximization of the expected student grade point average given the student’s performance in passed courses. All resulting problems are mixed-integer linear programming problems with a number of binary variables, that is, the max number of terms times the number of courses available for the student to take. The resulting mathematical programming problem is solvable in less than 10 seconds on a modern commercial off-the-shelf PC, whereas the manual process used to take more than one hour of advising time for every student and, as measured by the objectives set forth, resulted in suboptimal schedules. History: This paper was refereed.