I always tell people that it is absolutely crazy not to make decisions based on data if you have data that can be used. A good example of this came into play at my work recently when there have been discussions around various term schedules. Currently, the school in question has a traditional two semester school year, with alternating four period days. This means that students have eight classes per term. A lot of the concern comes from the rotating days and missing courses constantly for holidays, activities, and remedial Fridays. Another concern is that eight classes is a lot to juggle at a time and that students might perform better by having less courses at a time, but to maintain the amount of credits achievable in a year, more terms would be needed.
Having done most of my undergraduate program at a trimester based university, I enjoyed the idea because as a student I felt the shorter terms contributed to my success because it was a shorter, more focused approached to learning. So immediately I turned to our datasets to see if I could put together any good data to support a shorter term.
You can find the work of the study in the R Notebook below.