Trends in Graduate Admissions Statistics
CSCI E-64 Final Project
Karin Hansen <karinehansen@gmail.com>
Overview
Each year the University department where I work receives over 500 applications for admission to their PhD program. Of those, approximately 150 are admitted and approximately 50 accept the offer. The applications contain very interesting data such as scores and locations that could be useful for optimizing future admissions cycles (e.g., targeting best and most receptive students). Given the volume of data, however, the only way to effectively view trends is to create an interactive visualization. Such visualization could help answer the following questions:
- What states do students come from and has this changed over time?
- What are the top universities students apply from and have they changed over time?
- Who are the most popular faculty choices and have they changed over time?
- What average GPA and GRE scores to applicants have and has this changed over time?
- How do the above differ between applied, admitted and accepted graduated students?
Visualization Design
The visualization I designed includes the following linked panels (see applet below):
- US Map (upper left) – States are colored based on number of students in the state. A legend on the right shows which color corresponds to which range of students. The ranges are dynamic generated based on the number of students being shown (based on query panel). Hovering the mouse over the circle at the center of a state will 1/ show a tooltip with the state abbreviation and the number of students 2/ show details about admissions statistics for students from the state as a line graph in the upper right.
- GRE/GPA Scores (Upper right) – Line graph with GRE % Y axis left, GPA Y axis right, years X axis. Highlighting a data point on the score line graph will show the actual average score as a tooltip.
- Universities (Middle left) – Bar chart. The fifteen universities with the most students are shown in descending order. Hovering the mouse over a bar will outline the bar in red as visual feedback and show detail about all students from the selected university in the line graph on the upper right.
- Faculty Members (Middle right) – Bar chart. The fifteen faculty members with the most student interest are shown in descending order. Hovering the mouse over a bar will outline the bar in red as visual feedback and show detail about all students who listed the faculty member in the line graph on the upper right. Hovering the mouse over a current faculty member last name will make the text blue (like a link) and clicking it will cause the faculty member’s research page to open in the web browser.
- Query Panel (bottom) – Controls to allow selection of subsets of data via dynamic queries. Including year and admissions status (applied, admitted, accepted). Clicking on one of the status option will turn the circle red and will cause the data for the map, score, university and faculty charts to be filtered by the selected status. Clicking a year will filter data by that year (except the score chart since it shows all years). It is possible to filter by both status and year.
- Highlight Detail Graph (Upper right)– This line graph shows details of students from a specific state, university or faculty member. It is only visible if one of the above is highlighted.
- Help – In the four main panel there are help icons that if you hover you mouse over show a box with information about the relent panel. It includes more details than summarized above.
Applet and Source Code
The data shown in the applet below is a subset of the real admissions data and has been randomized and modified to protect the privacy of the applicants. In other words, the data you see below isn't real, but allows you to test the application.
Source code: GraduateAdmissions DataTable Item Table
Built with Processing
May 22, 2009