Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge reports on East Carolina University using an AI platform to increase graduation rates by not just analyzing grades, but also "language-based data," which could include college essays.

• For those in the education sector, it's worth looking at how technology can help us evaluate with better nuance. But are we relying too much on machines to provide the measuring sticks?

• We also need to examine college admissions criteria through an equity lens.

In higher education, predictive analytics often draw from data that an institution has readily available about its students: grades, attendance, online school-related activity, and even historical and demographic information.

But one university is trying to incorporate unstructured data — in particular, college admission essays — to predict how likely a student will persist and graduate on time.

“We always felt there could be intelligence in narrative data that we weren’t tapping,” says Ron Mitchelson, provost and senior vice chancellor of East Carolina University.

East Carolina University is working with IBM’s artificial intelligence platform, Watson, to explore how natural-language processing technologies can enhance their existing efforts to increase graduation rates.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 37 percent of full-time students graduate from ECU after four years. And the school’s overall retention rate, meaning first-time students who return to continue their studies the following fall, is 83 percent. Mitchelson says the school hopes to bring that number up to 85 to 90 percent.

The university already looks at student data such as grades or how frequently a student interacts with Blackboard, the school’s instructional platform. These systems capture structured data that Mitchelson believes the school is “probably well equipped to analyze.”

But when it comes to more nuanced, language-based data, the provost says, “there is a lot of unstructured narrative data that we are not well-positioned to retrieve and analyze, and IBM will help us with that.” In particular, Mitchelson says the school is interested in finding out if the language used in admission essays “might indicate something about a student’s feelings about going to school and their level of commitment.”

Read the full article about how colleges essays might predict future success by Sydney Johnson at EdSurge.