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College Score Card Ranking

Introduction

College Score Card Ranking is a College-Recommendation Program by Python

Our Mission

Nowadays, getting into an ideal college is an important step for students to receive better education as well as their future career development. However, choosing an appropriate college can be challenging. Our research purpose is to assist students to find their ideal colleges by providing 5 top college information with basic information

Students with different backgrounds have different needs and concerns about college requirements. We categorize three major groups of prospective students: International, local and transfer students, and we will evaluate different factors based on each group?s needs.

Summary Of Research Questions:

• How should we come out with different solutions that can help different types of students (Ex: internaxtional students, local students, transfer students) to find the colleges that suit them most by applying the dataset?
• How can the different factors (like academic rank, tuition fee) be used together within different influence score to come out a total rank of a school?
• We can also predict a college’s future acceptance rate to predict collecting the previous year’s data (from 1996 - 2014) and find functions to describe the relationships between those data. Is there any way to analyze the trend of acceptance rate of a college so that the students have a better idea of which colleges to go?

Dataset

We collected our dataset from data.gov

Dataset Download Here

Methodology

User Inputs

We designed our input panel into two parts: Recommendation Panel & Acceptance Rate Panel

1. College Recommendation Panel

a. Describe your student status: International/Local/Transfer?

b. Enter your SAT Score:

c. Enter your expected Maximum Tuition(per quarter)?

Influence Score

Influence score is the key for our recommendation-program.

influence score for each filtered college information will be calculated based on different factors of interest, and the calculation is different for International, local and transfer students.

Groups of interest: (*Note: influence score for each college is a single value. It starts from 0; it evaluates and sums up the weight of each factor)

Methodology:

a. International Students:

•   Tuition: 15% 
  

•   SAT: 40%
  

•   Ranking: 20%
  

•   Acceptance Rate: 35%
  

b. Local Students:

•   Tuition: 20%
  

•   Debt: 10%
  

•   Gender Ratio: 10%
  

•   SAT: 25%
  

•   Acceptance Rate: 35%
  

c. Transfer Students:

•   Acceptance Rate: 40%
  

•   Tuition: 30%
  

•   SAT: 10%
  

•   Ranking: 20%
  

• Sum up the influence score for each college by adding up each factor?s weight

• Select the top 5 influence scores and present the users with the corresponding college information: name, location, tuition, ranking, SAT average, acceptance rate, gender ratio.

• Provide the top college suggestion?s acceptance rate trending from 1996 - 2014, and see if the trend is going up or down.

Project Challenges

Let's take a glance of our original data:

Since the data are extracted directly from the system, we can see the column names are unorganized, and there are a large amount of **NULL**s, which made us hard to filter and re-organize the dataset

Panel Instruction

Please View Instruction - Here

Results Present

College Recommendation

a) International 
b) Local 
c) Tranfer: 
? (Please Type a, b, c):
b
please input your sat score:2000
please input your maximum tuition you can accept:8000

1. Brigham Young University-Idaho
score: 0.780645154651
city:Rexburg	state:ID	rank:314	tuition:3850.0	sat:1036.0	AC:0.996263079223	debt:5750.0	Mal:0.4253

2. Southern University at New Orleans
score: 0.660160232884
city:New Orleans	state:LA	rank:1428	tuition:4911.0	sat:808.0	AC:0.488803582853	debt:14250.0	Mal:0.2503

3. Alcorn State University
score: 0.654914321391
city:Alcorn State	state:MS	rank:1037	tuition:6108.0	sat:851.0	AC:0.829139072848	debt:16000.0	Mal:0.3541

College Acceptance Rate Trend (2004 - 2013)

Recommend College OR Check Accept Rate? Enter R or A or Exit: A
Enter a University Name(Full Name):Cornell University

• Cornell University

Recommend College OR Check Accept Rate? Enter R or A or Exit: A
Enter a University Name(Full Name): New York University

• New York University