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，帮助未来和新入学的大学生在大学学位的主修/辅修选择方面做出具有挑战性的决定。研究表明，20%到50%的学生在进入大学时尚未决定想要的专业，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总债务推高至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，然后显示与该测验结果一致的主修和辅修。学生从这个列表中进行选择，然后点击一个按钮，查看相应的逐学期最短路径学位计划，这些计划的标签表明它们与个性测验结果一致。这种简单易用的方法使学生能够在知情的情况下及早做出大学职业选择。全国各地的高校希望购买和安装该软件的原因有很多，包括：表示他们致力于帮助学生避免糟糕的大学职业决定所带来的过于常见的困难和费用，获得更高的毕业率，并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整合个性兴趣评估档案，为个别大学课程分配兴趣矢量，以及在制定与学生兴趣矢量相一致的学位计划时利用这些信息，使用最先进的数学优化技术来快速生成最短路径学位计划，并在此计划集合内自动生成多个计划，然后进行聚类和聚类标记，以便提供一个简单的界面，使学生能够轻松地在可供选择的学位计划集合中导航。这些技术创新之所以成为可能，是因为公司团队成员在算法开发方面的多年经验，并代表了一种在现有学术规划软件非常有限的集合中所没有的方法，这些软件往往专注于繁琐的拖放技术，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，任何学术机构都很容易负担得起，这将允许潜在的和犹豫不决的学生通过点击几下鼠标来详细地发现和探索那些与他们的个人兴趣相一致的大学职业。

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.