An Intelligent Question Answering Platform for Graduate Enrollment

To enhance the competitiveness of colleges and universities in the graduate enrollment and reduce the pressure on candidates for examination and consultation, it is necessary and practically significant to develop an intelligent Q&A platform, which can understand and analyze users' semantics and accurately return the information they need. However, there are problems such as the low volume and low quality of the corpus in the graduate enrollment, this paper develops a question answering platform based on a novel retrieval model including density-based logistic regression and the combination of convolutional neural networks and bidirectional long short-term memory. The experimental results show that the proposed model can effectively alleviate the problem of data sparseness and greatly improve the accuracy of the retrieval performance for the graduate enrollment.

Helping Students From the McNair Scholars Program Enroll in Graduate School: A Multilevel Modeling Examination

Due to structural educational inequity, students who are first-generation, low-income, and certain students of color have lower graduate degree attainment compared to their peers. One national program, the Ronald E. McNair Post- Baccalaureate Achievement Program, serves students from these groups to increase the number of students from these backgrounds who enroll in graduate school and obtain a doctoral degree. This study utilized federal data to examine graduate school enrollment rates for students from this program and understand variation among programs in students enrolling in graduate school. Results indicate that program funding and length of time funded do not statistically and significantly relate to graduate enrollment rates. Additionally, the program works better to help students who were able to graduate with an undergraduate degree. The article concludes with practical implications for those in higher education and limitations of the study.

On Effort and Achievement of Business Undergraduate and Graduate Students under a Disastrous Event

<p class="apa">The 2011 tornado event in Alabama left college students with a choice to be exempt of their final examinations or participate in an attempt to improve their overall grades. This incident provided an opportunity to conduct an observational study with the goal of measuring the academic effort of business undergraduate and graduate students. The observation methodology utilized total enrollment of 3804 with an undergraduate enrollment of 3298 and a graduate enrollment of 506 for the spring term of 2011 which included 969 undergraduates and 276 graduates. A stratified random sampling was used to collect enrollment data according to 8 disciplines within the business college. Findings of this study suggest graduate students outperform undergraduate students in grade improvement. In fact, the eligibility rate and successful rate for obtaining a higher grade after taking a final examination for both undergraduates and graduates were statistically insignificant. However, the participation rate for taking the final examination between undergraduates and graduates was statistically different.</p>

Increasing the Diversity of Your Graduate Program: Translating Best Practices into Success

Despite awareness in the geosciences that our field has a substantial lack of diversity in our workforce and student body, and countless efforts to broaden participation, graduate enrollment in the atmospheric sciences by students who are from traditionally underrepresented groups (i.e., African American, Hispanic, and American Indian students) is only slowly increasing, from 6% in 2005 to about 8.5% currently. In 2005, the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) had a minority enrollment of 3.5%, which was lower than the national enrollment statistics of 6.0%. Through a concerted effort to better reflect the demographic makeup of the United States, the department now boasts a figure closer to 16%. Our students do cutting-edge research, participate in field campaigns, and are actively involved in professional societies, such as the American Meteorological Society (AMS). We expect that many of our students will become faculty or researchers and hopefully will mentor students themselves one day. Our article highlights the strategic initiative we have used to increase the diversity in atmospheric science, in hopes that our findings can present a model that can be replicated in other geoscience departments across the nation.