SAES- Expert System for Advising Academic Major An Indian Perspective

Most students in India choose their undergraduate major solely on the basis of persisting trends in the society. Due to the lack of a holistic guidance system, students often end up making choices solely on the basis of the above parameter, which in eventuality, may fail to align with the student's actual interest and inherent aptitude towards a particular major. In this paper we propose an expert system-SAES which aims to provide intelligent advice to the student as to which major he/she should opt. SAES acquires knowledge of academic performances as well as explicit and implicit interests of the candidate. Knowledge representation in SAES is done by the use of a combination of case based and rule based reasoning. SAES draws inferences on the basis of acquired knowledge and also takes into account the degree of dilemma faced by the candidate and the time he/she takes to decide the interest areas. SAES then recommends the most suitable majors for each candidate, which are further classified as strong, mild and weak on the basis of calculated relative probabilities of success. At the end, we analyze results of the test conducted on a working prototype of SAES.