Abstract
Choosing a major can be a difficult choice for undeclared students, depending on personal interests, job markets, program costs, and the complexity of graduation requirements. The current procedure for exploring possible majors/minors involves a tedious and time-consuming exploration of static data presented in a convoluted format. This work considers the complexity of degree requirements and presents the design and implementation of an efficient decision support system (DSS) for exploring majors and/or minors. The DSS presents a tool that enables college students to map their already completed courses to degree requirements and then view the majors/minors that yield the shortest path for graduation. Secondly, the DSS system provides data visualization tools to assist students in selecting courses that satisfy the remaining requirements of a selected major/minor.
Highlights
It is estimated that 20 to 50 percent of students enter college in the U.S as undecided or undeclared, without having decided on a focus for their studies, and more than 50 percent of students change their major at least once before graduation (Gordan & Steel, 2015)
Developing a mechanism to generate a set of feasible majors, depending on a set of completed courses and desired graduation date, is a complex problem that involves comparing a large number of possible degree paths
Academic Advising Report (AAR) or Degree Progress Report (DPR) is the official document used for advising and the information related to degree requirements, course schedules, and course prerequisites are stored in static documents or PDF files
Summary
Sobitha Samaranayake1, Athula D. A. Gunawardena1, & Robert Meyer2 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, USA 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA Correspondence: Sobitha Samaranayake, Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI 53190, USA.
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