A decision support system towards proactive management of academic success: the case of UCP

This study presents a decision support system (DSS) for the proactive management of academic success in the context of Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP), Portugal. The DSS takes advantage of descriptive and predictive business analytics techniques to extract knowledge from data that characterize the profile of students according to multiple dimensions. In particular, the system offers three main functionalities: (i) the benchmarking of information between the university’s campuses; (ii) the (descriptive) modeling of the academic success rate, including the formulation of a closed-form expression to measure success; and (iii) the (predictive) modeling of student dropouts. While the proposed DSS is designed for the reality of a single higher education institution, it could serve as a benchmark for researchers and academic staff from other higher education institutions interested in developing similar projects.