Student-level course data

Student-level course information for approximately 98,000 undergraduates, keyed by student ID. Data at the "student-level" refers to information collected by undergraduate institutions about individual students, for example, course name and number, credit hours, and student grades.

Usage

data(course)

Format

A data.frame and data.table with 12 variables and approximately 3.3M observations of 97,555 unique students occupying 325 MB of memory:

mcid

Character, anonymized student identifier, e.g., MCID3111142225.

institution

Character, de-identified institution name, e.g., Institution A, Institution B, etc.

term_course

Character, academic year and term, format YYYYT.

course

Character, course name, e.g., Astrophysics III, Calculus For Social Science And Business, Corp Financial Rprtng 1, Environmental Sanitation II, Fitness and Wellness, Introductory Astronomy 2, Our Changing Environment, etc.

abbrev

Character, course alpha identifier, e.g. AA, MATH, ACCT, EH, HES, ASTR, etc.

number

Character, course numeric identifier, e.g. 1104, 1209, 228, 4047, etc.

section

Character, course section identifier, from one to four characters, e.g., 1, 2, 01, 14, 001, 040, 785, H02, R01, 300E, 888R, etc.

type

Character, predominant delivery method for this section, e.g., Blended, Distance Education, Face-to-Face, Online, etc.

faculty_rank

Character, academic rank of the person teaching the course, e.g., Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Graduate Assistant, Visiting Faculty, etc.

hours_course

Numeric, number of credit-hours for successful course completion.

grade

Character, course grade, e.g., A+, A, A-, B+, I, NG, etc.

discipline_midfield

Character, a variable for grouping courses by academic discipline assigned by the MIDFIELD data curator, e.g., Anthropology, Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Language and Literature, Mathematics, Visual and Performing Arts, etc.

Source

2022 MIDFIELD database

Details

Course data are structured in block-record form, that is, records associated with a particular ID can span multiple rows—one record per student per course per term.

Terms are encoded YYYYT, where YYYY is the year at the start of the academic year and T encodes the semester or quarter within an academic year as Fall (1), Winter (2), Spring (3), and Summer (4, 5, and 6). For example, for academic year 1995–96, Fall 95–96 is encoded 19951, Spring 95–96 is encoded 19953, and the first Summer 95-96 term is encoded 19954. The source database includes special month-long sessions encoded with letters A, B, C, etc., though none are included in this sample.

The possible values of the grade variable includes NG for "no grade given", which is not the same as W indicating a withdrawal. For example, a lab course may be a mandatory co-requisite for a lecture course, but a grade is given for the lecture course and the lab grade is recorded as NG.

The data in midfielddata are a proportionate stratified sample of the MIDFIELD database, but are not suitable for drawing inferences about program attributes or student experiences—midfielddata provides practice data, not research data.

See also

Package midfieldr for tools and methods for working with MIDFIELD data in R.

Other datasets: degree, student, term

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{

# Load data
data(course)

# Select specific rows and columns
rows_we_want <- course$mcid == MCID3112192438
cols_we_want <- c(mcid, term_course, course, grade)

# View observations for this ID 
course[rows_we_want, cols_we_want]

} # }