A Comparative Study on the Academic Performance of Three Information System (IS) Streams at the University of Botswana

The University of Botswana (UB) has been offering the Bachelor of Information Systems (BIS) programme since 2002. The offering is done via three streams - Business Information Systems (BIS), Computer Information Systems (CIS) and Information Management (IM) through three departments: Department of Accounting & Finance, Department of Computer Science, and Department of Library and Information Studies respectively. In 2010, a new curriculum was approved that has since been implemented by the three streams for about five years. The focus of the new curriculum was that each of the streams of the BIS degree would endeavor to focus on the areas of paramount importance to the specific department offering the particular stream. The new curriculum uses the IS 2010 model curricula.

There are twenty (20) common courses to the three streams (which form 66% of the total courses) in the four-year programme; the remaining 34% are programme specific. The assessment criteria for the common courses (except three courses) are all the same at any course offering, students from all the three streams were taught by the same lecturer and given the same laboratory support and configurations. The programme therefore becomes appropriate for a comparative study of the three groups of students in this research. What can we learn from student performance in the common courses over the last few years?

The researchers employed a quantitative, methodology utilizing Chi-square to test significance, as well as means, frequencies and charts to help understand the performance within the three streams. The analyses were based on students final marks over a three-year time span. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive relationships between final marks and the streams in seventeen common courses. The data consists of 3485 records spanning three academic years.

The result of the analysis demonstrate that there is significant difference in student performance across the three streams, differences within the individual courses as well as overall performance difference for course groupings, none of which is biased by the department that is teaching the course. Three out of the seventeen courses taught were programming courses, which contributed to the major difference and low performance among the streams. Zhang et.al. [1] show that students' current programming skills, prior programming experience and grade expectations are significant factors that determine learning performance in teaching introductory programming to IS students. Although IM had a lower performance in initial programming courses, in advanced programming courses they are almost performing at the same level. This might mean there is need for additional initial preparation of IM students for the programming courses as well as continuous assistance and preparation of students for all the three streams in order to improve overallperformance in programming.