Colleges Mine Data to Predict Dropouts

When students log into the course Web site for Purdue University's freshman biology laboratory class, they see an image of a traffic light. Green means they're doing well, yellow means they're faltering, and red means they might fail.

So who's the traffic cop?

It's not the professor, and it's not the teaching assistants. Rather, it's a sophisticated computer algorithm that predicts when students are at risk of failing, based on their preparation going into the class and their behavior on the course's Web site. Read more ...