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Planning Courses for Student Success at the American College of Greece

Author

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  • 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
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    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. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. R. Alan Bowman, 2021. "Developing Optimal Student Plans of Study," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 51(6), pages 409-421, November.
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    Cited by:

    1. Elmar Steiner & Ulrich Pferschy & Andrea Schaerf, 2025. "Curriculum-based university course timetabling considering individual course of studies," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 33(1), pages 277-314, March.

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