Academic Course Equivalence System

The book presents an automatic system for internal and external courses equivalency at universities. The system facilitates the process of courses equivalency through statistically investigating the similarity between a certain course and all the courses appeared in department's academic program. The system gives the Head of the department precise ratio about the resemblance between two courses. I built Information Retrieval system that accepts two kinds of input, the dataset which represent the courses description taken from department's academic program and the abstract of the course to be equalized. After performing the necessary preprocessing stages which include stop word removing, stemming, and indexing. The system uses Vector Space Model (VSM) based on cosine similarity to make the matching process, VSM calculates the similarity between each document in the collection and certain user query which is in our case the course to be equalized. VSM yields the similarity between documents by computing the cosine of the angle between the vector that represent them. Besides the equivalency decision,the system returns the ratio of similarity between the course to be equalized.