Improving Workload Balancing in Academic Curricula Through Subject Failure Data

When feeling overloaded, the student tends to adopt a superficial approach to learning, which may result in little knowledge, course failure, and dropout. The Balancing Academic Curriculum Problem (BACP) is an alternative to planning the student's workload by distributing subjects to periods in a balanced way, based on the number of credits and the respect of prerequisites. This article presents a multi-objective model, named Balancing Academic Curriculum With Subjects Failure Data (BACF), that seeks to distribute credits more evenly across periods, bring together interrelated subjects, and promote a more balanced distribution of subjects with high failure rates. The results from four higher education curricula showed significant improvements in the balance of students' workload, which are essential to reducing subject failure and, consequently, dropout rates in courses.