Students’ Academic Performance Analysis based on HSE Ranking System and Logs of Online Presence in Social Network “VK.com”

The aim of this research paper was to determine whether s the academic performance of students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Higher school of economics. The main task was to determine whether there is a correlation between academic achievement of students and the amount of time spent by them in the social network "VKontakte" during classes. There were three types of data needed to reach the stated goal: data on online presence of students in social network "VKontakte" (16 days from 9:00 to 18:00 with a five-minute time interval), data on students’ academic performance on schedule of their classes, which was freely available on the HSE website. By combining all this data it was possible to understand the amount of time each student spent online any given day during any given class. For the automation of data collection, two applications have been developed. The first one heled to check the online status of more than 7 0000 students every five minutes during 16 days (was coded on C#). The second application was used to automate the collection of data on the schedule of students’ classes from Higher School of Economics website (was coded on Python). As a means of analyzing all collected data, linear regression, logistic regression, and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient were used. As a result of the analysis, the main hypothesis of this research (that there is a correlation between student’s academic performance and the time they spend online in social network “Vkontakte” during classes) was not fully proven. Despite that, all the findings and results of this paper can be used to investigate this vital topic further in other colleges and universities or in other environments.