Construction of Markov Transition Matrices for Cohorts of Students in Bsc.Actuarial Science Programme

Abstract

This paper presents an application of Markov Analysis of student flow in a higher educational institution. In the education system not all students who begin an academic year stay till the end. Many of them invariably drop out for a variety of reasons. A transition model is one which describes the stocks and flows of students through an education system in terms of transition ratios. In this paper we describe one such model which traces the flow of a cohort of students through the system. In this study, the model considered is that of first-order Markov chain. Also the particular Markov chain studied here has a finite number of states and a finite number of points at which the observations are made. It is shown that under fairly general Markov chain model of the transitional determination, student flows do not display the random walk characteristics which may be interpreted as purely following a Markov process