A Decision Support System for Prescriptive Academic Advising

Abstract

A decision support system (DSS) was constructed to assist the academic advising staff of a college of business. The microcomputer-based system identifies any remaining unsatisfied degree program requirements, selects courses in which the student can enroll and then prioritizes them. Advisors are then able to spend time on more substantive or developmental advising issues, such as choice of electives, career options and life career goals. Using this system, a student with a minimum of computer knowledge can obtain an optimized course listing without the assistance of a human advisor in less than five minutes. A high-end spreadsheet (i.e., DSS generator) permits a workable and effective academic advising DSS. The database is the most significant part of this DSS. And, since the modeling component is difficult to separate from the structure of the data itself, a database management system might be a better choice as the DSS generator. This platform would provide a more flexible user interface as well as superior data handling capability but at some sacrifice in cost and implementation time.