Placement model for students into appropriate academic class using machine learning

Abstract

Choosing the right academic major for junior secondary students into senior secondary school will assist both students and their teachers toward achieving the academic goal. Traditionally, students seeking admission into senior classes (Gambia, Sierra-leone, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria) must have passed stipulated examinations like Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and/or West Africa Junior Certificate Examination, which are done at the end of year three (at a sitting). They must pass the exam(s) satisfactorily with no emphasis on any of Science, Art or Commercial related subjects. Some schools use “Mock exam” or “Placement exam” as the basis for their placement of students but all are done at a sitting (end of year three). Though this method is to an extent valid but associated with some challenges (bias) as it does not carry along the student’s academic history in making decision for placement into appropriate class. However, we proposed a model that predicts appropriate academic class of Science, Art or Commercial for Junior students based on their progressive academic performances (history) of their predecessors on related subjects using ten supervised machine learning techniques. Two evaluation techniques were applied (70/30 splitting and 10-fold cross validation). The highest results of this research showed accuracy of 93% with Random forest, 98% precision with random forest, 99% recall with Decision tree and 94% f1 score with Random forest and KNN (cross validation). The correlation coefficient of the proposed model recorded 0.3 higher than that of the existing method. This research will benefit all stakeholders in education and students in particular because their academic performances over time stands a better chance for appropriate placement.