A New Machine-Learning-Driven Grade-Point Average Prediction Approach for College Students Incorporating Psychological Evaluations in the Post-COVID-19 Era

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years, intelligent evaluation of college students’ growth by means of the monitoring data from training processes is becoming a promising technique in the field intelligent education. Current studies, however, tend to utilize course grades, which are objective, to predict students’ grade-point averages (GPAs), but usually neglect subjective factors like psychological resilience. To solve this problem, this paper takes mechanical engineering as the research object, and proposes a new machine-learning-driven GPA prediction approach to evaluate the academic performance of engineering students by incorporating psychological evaluation data into basic course scores. Specifically, this paper adopts SCL-90 psychological assessment data collected in the freshman year, including key mental health indicators such as somatization, depression, hostility, and interpersonal sensitivity indicators, as well as professional basic course scores, including mechanical principles, mechanical design, advanced mathematics, and engineering drawing. Four representative machine learning algorithms, Support Vector Machine (SVM), CNN-CBAM, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Classification and Regression Tree (CART) that include deep and shallow models, respectively, are then employed to build a classification model for GPA prediction. This paper designs a validation experiment by tracking 229 students from the 2020 class from the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of Henan University of Science and Technology, China. The students’ academic performance in senior grades is divided into five classes to use as the prediction labels. It is verified that psychological data and course data can be effectively integrated into GPA prediction for college students, with an accuracy rate of 83.64%. Meanwhile, this paper also reveals that anxiety indicators in the psychological assessment data have the greatest impact on college students’ academic performance, followed by interpersonal sensitivity. The experimental results also show that, for predicting junior year GPAs, psychological factors play more important role than they do in predicting sophomore GPAs. Suggestions are therefore given: the current practice in existing undergraduate teaching, i.e., only conducting psychological assessments in the initial freshman year, should be updated by introducing follow-up psychological assessments in each academic year.