"… To capture data from admissions essays, Watson will be used to analyze and look for patterns in the text, such as keywords that have emotional connotations and could suggest how a student might persist through school, says Richard Strasser, associate partner at IBM working on higher education consulting. According to Strasser, that data is then turned into structured data and given a ‘correlations risk.’
Researchers who study predictive analytics in higher education say admissions essays and natural language processing could help identify students who may be at-risk of dropping out, in particular during their first year." …