Analyzing Academic Records for Informed Administration: The Stanford Curriculum Study.

Universities and colleges have often ignored one of their most valuable and accessible resources-their records of student background data and course transcripts. Especially now that so many institutions compile records of student academic accomplishment in computer files, they have great potential to analyze them with relative ease using a variety of statistical packages. Yet little systematic and sustained analysis of student records has been done. Ad hoc analyses directed at particular policy decisions are common enough, and some more general analyses have been reported in the literature [2, 5, 7, 12, 15], but long-term or comparative studies that put ad hoc findings into a larger interpretive context are rare indeed. Stanford University has exerted much effort over the past decade to use student records in a systematic and informative way. Initiated in 1976 by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies, in collaboration with the Office of the Registrar, the Stanford Curriculum Study has made it easier for policy decisions to be informed by reliable and comprehensive data about student academic choices rather than by