Higher Education Institutions keep a sizable amount of data, including student records and the structure of degree curricula. This work, adopting a process mining approach, focuses on the problem of identifying how closely students follow the recommended order of the courses in a degree curriculum, and to what extent their performance is affected by the order they actually adopt. It addresses this problem by applying to student records two already existing techniques: process discovery and conformance checking, and frequent itemsets. Finally, the dissertation covers experiments performed by applying these techniques to a case study involving over 60,000 student records from PUC-Rio. The experiments show that the frequent itemsets technique performs better than the process discovery and conformance checking techniques. They equally confirm the relevance of analyses based on the process mining approach to help academic coordinators in their quest for better degree curricula.