Automating GPA and Hours for administrative purposes, University of Houston: the 'coogs' package

In the realm of institutional effectiveness, it is often necessary to batch process the hours earned and gpas of both the content area and cumulative area for undergraduates that are applying for particular majors in certain programs of study. Such calculations involve many students applying at one time for majors. Therefore, one can either calculate tens to hundreds of students at a time or automate the process.

To ease the process through automation, I have created a function in R called 'bulkgpa' in the 'coogs' package, available to the institutional effectiveness community at the College of Education at the University of Houston.

The function is a hard worker. It takes three raw files directly from peoplesoft queries and cleanses them by eliminating unneeded columns, duplicated rows, and eliminates classes that have drop dates associated with them.

Argument slots are created for raw data excel spreadsheets including transfer classes, transfer hours, UH courses, and the content areas for which content gpa must be calculated. Since different classes qualify for content gpa based on content areas, the fourth argument slot makes available user input to specify the content area for the content gpa calculation. Below is a list of possible options. When typing in the content area, case and spelling should be observed from the list below.

core-ec-6

art-ec-12

dance-6-12

math-4-8

math-7-12

elar-4-8

elar-7-12

chemistry-8-12

LOTE-spanish-ec-12

physics-math-7-12

life-science-7-12

physical-science-7-12

bilingual-generalist-ec-6

science

social-science

sped-ed-12

journalism

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Researching Education

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