Modelling Performance of Students with Generalized Linear Mixed Models

We propose generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) to evaluate the performance of undergraduate students from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). For each student we have the final GPA score as well as the number of courses he/she failed during his/her Bachelor's degree. The courses are separated in three categories: Required (R), Elective (E) and Extracurricular courses (Ex).Therefore, for each response variable, each student may have at most three measures. In this model we need to take into account the within student correlation between required, elective and extracurricular courses.The main purpose of this study is the sector of High School education from which college students come - Private or Public. As some affirmative action programs are being implemented by the Brazilian government to include more students from Public Schools in the Universities, there is a great interest in studies of performance of undergraduate students according to the sector of High School of which they come from. The data set comes from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), a public institution, in the State of S~ao Paulo, Brazil and one of the top universities in Brazil. The socioeconomic status and academic data of more than 10,000 students admitted to Unicamp from 2000 through 2005 forms the study database.