Data mining models for student careers

•We presents a data mining methodology to analyze the careers of University graduated students.•We present different approaches based on clustering and sequential patterns techniques.•We introduce the concept of ideal career.•We compare the career of a generic student with the ideal one.•We apply the methodology to a real case study and interpret the results.

This paper presents a data mining methodology to analyze the careers of University graduated students. We present different approaches based on clustering and sequential patterns techniques in order to identify strategies for improving the performance of students and the scheduling of exams. We introduce an ideal career as the career of an ideal student which has taken each examination just after the end of the corresponding course, without delays. We then compare the career of a generic student with the ideal one by using the different techniques just introduced. Finally, we apply the methodology to a real case study and interpret the results which underline that the more students follow the order given by the ideal career the more they get good performance in terms of graduation time and final grade.