SBIR Phase I: Interest-Aligned College Degree Planning within an Optimized Multiplan Framework

这个SBIR第一阶段项目将开发一个基于网络的应用程序，帮助未来的和新的大学生在他们的大学学位的专业/辅修选择的挑战性的决定。研究表明，20%到50%的学生在进入大学时没有决定自己想要的专业，随后令人惊讶的是，75%的学生在毕业前至少换了一次专业。这些统计数据说明了阻碍按时完成学位并将学生债务总额提高到万亿美元水平的关键因素之一。拟议的系统管理一个简短但备受推崇的个性测验，然后显示与测验结果相一致的专业和未成年人。学生从这个列表中做出选择，然后点击一个按钮来查看相应的一组每学期最短路径的学位计划，这些计划附有标签，表明它们与性格测试结果的一致性。这种易于使用的方法使学生能够及早做出明智的大学职业选择。全国各地的大学都希望购买和安装这个软件，原因有很多，包括：为了表明他们的承诺，帮助学生避免在糟糕的大学职业决定中遇到的常见困难和费用，为了提高毕业率，为了通过学生计划数据库改善未来学期的行政资源规划。该软件系统的关键技术创新包括在学位规划系统中集成个性兴趣评估档案，将兴趣向量分配到各个大学课程，并利用这些信息制定与学生兴趣向量非常一致的学位计划，使用最先进的数学优化技术以快速生成最短路径的学位计划。自动生成多个计划，然后在该计划集合中进行聚类和聚类标记，以便提供一个简单的界面，允许学生轻松地浏览可选择的学位计划集合。这些技术创新是由公司团队成员在算法开发方面的多年经验实现的，并且代表了一种在现有学术规划软件的非常有限的集合中看不到的方法，这些软件往往侧重于繁琐的拖放技术，从而阻碍了对替代学位路径的探索。这项研究的目标是提供一个易于定制和易于安装的学位规划系统，任何学术机构都可以轻松负担得起，这将允许潜在的和尚未决定的学生发现和探索细节-只需点击几下鼠标-那些与他们个人兴趣一致的大学职业。

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a web-based application that assists prospective and new college students in the challenging decision of the major/minor choice for their college degree. Studies have shown that 20 to 50 percent of students enter college as undecided in terms of intended majors, and subsequently an astonishing 75 percent actually change their major at least once before graduation. These statistics illustrate one of the key factors that hinder on-time degree completion and boost total student debt to the trillion dollar level. The proposed system administers a brief but highly-regarded personality quiz, then displays majors and minors that align with the results of that quiz. The student makes selections from this list, then clicks a button to see groups of corresponding semester-by-semester shortest-path degree plans with labels indicating their alignment with the personality quiz result. This easy-to-use approach empowers students to make early, well-informed college career choices. Colleges across the country will want to purchase and install this software for many reasons, including: to show their commitment to helping students avoid the all-too-common difficulties and expense of poor college career decisions, to obtain improved graduation rates, and to improve administrative resource planning for future semesters via a database of their students' plans.The key technical innovations of this software system include integration of a personality interest assessment profile within a degree planning system, assignment of interest vectors to individual college courses along with the utilization of this information in the development of degree plans that are well-aligned with student interest vectors, the use of state-of-the-art mathematical optimization techniques in order to quickly generate shortest-path degree plans, and automated multiple-plan generation followed by clustering and cluster labeling within this plan collection in order to provide a simple interface that allows a student to easily navigate through a collection of alternative degree plans. These technical innovations are made possible by the many years of experience in algorithm development by the company team members, and represent an approach not seen in the very limited collection of existing academic planning software, which tends to focus on cumbersome drag-and-drop technology that discourages the exploration of alternative degree paths. The goal of this research is to provide an easy-to-customize and easy-to-install degree planning system that will be readily affordable by any academic institution and that will allow prospective and undecided students to discover and explore in detail - with just a few mouse clicks - those college careers that are aligned with their personal interests.