BI shows girls do better than boys at University of Greenwich

The University of Greenwich has found that women students are consistently performing better than men through the use of business intelligence software.

It graphed the student population after working over the past three years with the company SAP, using its software Business Objects to provide data through business intelligence.

She said: "It's a measure of something that is coming from the school system to the university sector."

"That particular analysis goes to our academic council, they would sit and discuss it, come up rationale with why it's happening, and determine if it's something we've got to respond to."

It was suggested that this was because of the coursework-nature of university programmes, and Cooper said that there was evidence that women were more diligent and thorough on this work and benefited from this approach.

The discovery was made after Greenwich upgraded to new BI systems. Greenwich was one of the top ten universities in Britain for consultancy, bringing in 8 million in contract business, offering research expertise, technology transfer, business advice training and working in partnership with government and public bodies.

Greenwich had a complex IT system, running very big databases. This includes data dealing with admissions, general student accommodation, student finance, library systems, and timetabling.

The goal was to take the information from a wide range of disparate systems throughout the university, enable staff and students to see information which was useful, and respond to issues and problems that otherwise might not be addressed.

Also, Greenwich had to send a massive amount of data to the Higher Education Statistics Agency individualised student records with a whole variety of demographic and study data, a government requirement to get funding.

"There's a lot we have to supply," said Christine Cooper, head of planning and statistics at the University. "Age, gender, ethnicity, disability. A lot of that data we gathered for our own purposes."

The data was carried in Excel spreadsheets and an Oracle table for the last 15 years. The university put SAP's Business Objects over the top of this data stream.

As well as organise the data and send it to the statistics agency, Greenwich were able to provide reports to its schools, do annual reviews of its work, and plan for the future.

Cooper said: "It allows them to report on a wide range of things at an institution-wide level, a departmental level, or by individual level."