Visualisation of the admission quota of NUOL

This week, I found an interesting statistic about the students registered for admission to the National University of Laos (NUOL). This stat was posted on Laotian Time, showing the visualisation of the figures of examinees and the admitted students for the NUOL from 2016 to 2024. The purpose of this post is to show the decrease in the number of students admitted to NUOL, especially in 2024.

The above visualisation shows the number of students using the circle chart between the examinees and the admitted students. This visualisation aims to illustrate the decrease in examinees over time. Here, three points could be improved to make it better for visualisation.

1. A circle chart could cause a misleading comparison. Our eyes can quickly identify when an object is in a rectangle rather than a circle shape. Therefore, using circles to compare the portion could confuse the audience. The solution is to use the bar chart or column chart to compare two or more variables.
2. The alignment of the visualisation makes it difficult to compare year by year. Since the visualisation aligned each year in a grid order, comparing all the years at one time is difficult. This alignment allows you to compare to the neighbour chart only.
3. It takes an effort to get to the point. The point of this visualisation is that the number of examinees has significantly dropped compared to the previous years. Apart from this, we can see the trend of this data as it is a time series.

Let's fix it!🛠️

First, I changed the chart type from circle to bar chart to make it comparable.

With the bar chart, I can now easily compare the number of examinees and admission quota within the year and year by year. However, we can go further for visualisation as the purpose is to show the decrease in the number of examinees over time. Even though the bar chart can show a downward trend, identifying it can take time. Also, the admission quota is changed yearly, so it is better to transform it into a percentage, as shown below.

Now, I can identify the trend of the examinees. The interesting point is that 2024 is not the first year with a negative number of examinees; it is 2021. One reason for this event might be that it was in the post-COVID-19 phase, and the situation did not fully recover from this outbreak. Another thing to note is that there is a sign of a decrease in the number of examinees since 2018. The University might have a concern about it since then.

For the data, you can get it from here: https://github.com/douangtavanh/Admission-quota-of-National-University-of-Laos