Comparing examination results and courses evaluation: a data mining approach

This paper presents an analysis about the comparison between the exam results and the corresponding courses evaluation of university students. The analysis concerns students and courses of the Computer Science program at the University of Florence from 2001/2002 to 2007/2008 academic years. Before the end of each course, students evaluate different aspects of the course, such as the organization and the teaching. We collected and reorganized in an appropriate way evaluation data and the results obtained by students in terms of grades and delays with which they take their exams. Then we used clustering techniques to analyze these data thus showing that there is a correlation between the evaluation of a course and the corresponding average results.