IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orinte/v54y2024i4p365-379.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Planning Courses for Student Success at the American College of Greece

Author

Listed:
  • Ioannis T. Christou

    (Department of Information Technology, The American College of Greece, 15342 Athens, Greece)

  • Evgenia Vagianou

    (Department of Information Technology, The American College of Greece, 15342 Athens, Greece)

  • George Vardoulias

    (Department of Information Technology, The American College of Greece, 15342 Athens, 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 past 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Ioannis T. Christou & Evgenia Vagianou & George Vardoulias, 2024. "Planning Courses for Student Success at the American College of Greece," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 54(4), pages 365-379, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:54:y:2024:i:4:p:365-379
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.2022.0083
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.2022.0083
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/inte.2022.0083?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ofer Strichman, 2017. "Near-Optimal Course Scheduling at the Technion," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 47(6), pages 537-554, December.
    2. Ünal, Yusuf Ziya & Uysal, Özgür, 2014. "A new mixed integer programming model for curriculum balancing: Application to a Turkish university," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 238(1), pages 339-347.
    3. Christopher Garcia, 2019. "Practice Summary: Managing Capacity at the University of Mary Washington’s College of Business," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 49(2), pages 167-171, March.
    4. Jaime Miranda, 2010. "eClasSkeduler: A Course Scheduling System for the Executive Education Unit at the Universidad de Chile," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 40(3), pages 196-207, June.
    5. Gerardo Gonzalez & Christopher Richards & Alexandra Newman, 2018. "Optimal Course Scheduling for United States Air Force Academy Cadets," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 48(3), pages 217-234, June.
    6. R. Alan Bowman, 2021. "Developing Optimal Student Plans of Study," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 51(6), pages 409-421, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ciamac C. Moallemi & Utkarsh Patange, 2024. "Hybrid Scheduling with Mixed-Integer Programming at Columbia Business School," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 54(3), pages 222-240, May.
    2. Cristian D. Palma & Patrick Bornhardt, 2020. "Considering Section Balance in an Integer Optimization Model for the Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling Problem," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(10), pages 1-12, October.
    3. Esmaeilbeigi, Rasul & Mak-Hau, Vicky & Yearwood, John & Nguyen, Vivian, 2022. "The multiphase course timetabling problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 300(3), pages 1098-1119.
    4. Andrea Bettinelli & Valentina Cacchiani & Roberto Roberti & Paolo Toth, 2015. "An overview of curriculum-based course timetabling," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 23(2), pages 313-349, July.
    5. R. Alan Bowman, 2021. "Developing Optimal Student Plans of Study," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 51(6), pages 409-421, November.
    6. Andreas Dellnitz & Damian Pozo & Jochen Bauer & Andreas Kleine, 2023. "Practice Summary: Seminar Assignments in a University—MATLAB-Based Decision Support," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 53(4), pages 307-311, July.
    7. Christopher Garcia, 2019. "Practice Summary: Managing Capacity at the University of Mary Washington’s College of Business," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 49(2), pages 167-171, March.
    8. da Cunha, Joaquim J. & de Souza, Mauricio C., 2018. "A linearized model for academic staff assignment in a Brazilian university focusing on performance gain in quality indicators," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 197(C), pages 43-51.
    9. Raza, Syed Arshad, 2021. "Managing ethical requirements elicitation of complex socio-technical systems with critical systems thinking: A case of course-timetabling project," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    10. Fabian Dunke & Stefan Nickel, 2023. "A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 328(2), pages 1313-1348, September.
    11. J. Paul Brooks, 2012. "The Court of Appeals of Virginia Uses Integer Programming and Cloud Computing to Schedule Sessions," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(6), pages 544-553, December.
    12. Biniyam Asmare Kassa, 2015. "Implementing a Class-Scheduling System at the College of Business and Economics of Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 45(3), pages 203-215, June.
    13. Silva, Allyson & Coelho, Leandro C. & Darvish, Maryam, 2021. "Quadratic assignment problem variants: A survey and an effective parallel memetic iterated tabu search," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 292(3), pages 1066-1084.
    14. Amy B. Gore & Mary E. Kurz & Matthew J. Saltzman & Blake Splitter & William C. Bridges & Neil J. Calkin, 2022. "Clemson University’s Rotational Attendance Plan During COVID-19," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 52(6), pages 553-567, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:54:y:2024:i:4:p:365-379. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.