Monitoring students performances in French Institutes of Technology using the ScoDoc software

French University-based Institutes of Technology (IUT1) are a major player in France´s superior educational system. IUTs provide technical university education, preparing students to careers in the industry and services. The main diploma is called DUT, Diplome Universitaire de Technologie [2]. Designed to train mid-level technical staff in 2 years, IUT programmes also allow graduated students to pursue their studies with a more advanced degree, such as a licence professionnelle [4]. IUT students have very different profiles: most of them are coming from high school (with scientific or technical majors), but a significant proportion come from foreign countries (mainly Africa), or from other university tracks. Assessment of IUT students relies on continuous evaluation: there are in principle no terminal exams, but series of tests, monitoring the acquisition of competences. At the IUT de Villetaneuse (Universite Paris 13 - Sorbonne-Paris-Cité), we started more than ten years ago to design a dedicated information system to gather all available information concerning our students: personal data, results at all tests and exams, assiduity, orientation decision. This system, implemented in the open-source free software ScoDoc (https://trac.lipn.univ-paris13.fr/projects/ scodoc) monitors the progression of all students and raises alarms when some special pedagogical action should be taken. It is widely distributed and used in other French universities, and is wellsuited to handle the complex national regulations for semesters validation in IUTs. Prevention of student difficulties requires action from the pedagogical team: it could be as simple as talking to an individual student to discuss his personal situation, or as complex as detecting an homogeneous group of students sharing similar problems and proposing them an ad-hoc remediation plan (such as tutoring, personalised learning plan, or ad-hoc learning module). ScoDoc software system is intended for being used- by the pedagogical team as well as by the students. Indeed, students can access their marks summary at all times, and be informed of new marks as soon as they are entered in the system. They thus can monitor their performances and ask advice from the teachers for a better progress. Teachers can be assigned different roles according to their responsibilities in the organisation of studies. All of them can enter notes on a student in order for the pedagogical team to easily track past difficulties. Those involved in a specific course can enter their marks concerning this course, while the head of studies for a particular year or semester can also prepare summaries for the class of students they are in charge of. This is not only necessary for the validation of semesters, but also at any time to have a synthetic view of the class performance, pointing out difficulties in some subjects or of a group within the class. This paper is organised in three parts: first, we present the French IUT system and describe its peculiarities, insisting on the evaluation of the students. In section 2, the main features of the ScoDoc software are briefly presented. In section 3, we discuss how ScoDoc can be used to prevent student difficulties. Finally, in section 4, we discuss some future perspectives, such as the integration of more sophisticated predictive analytics technologies to enhance the relevance and accuracy of student real-time characterisation.