Tell the student: evidence-based advantages of prerequisites (discussion paper)

When bachelor and master degrees were introduced in the Italian system, the Engineering Faculty of Università Politecnica delle Marche dropped mandatory prerequisites between modules from its degrees. Since then, we periodically witness intense debates among professors, who think this led to unstructured learning practices with consequent performance issues, and students who are concerned of an overly constrained course of study. This paper briefly describes an ex-post analysis of the carriers of students enrolled in the bachelor degree in Computer and Automation Engineering based on process mining techniques, the resulting evidence about typical patterns followed by students, and sketches possible actions that can be put in practice to support students without constraining their course of study.