Implementing an efficient preference-based academic advising system

Effective academic advising has long been considered as an essential factor for the student academic performance and retention. The current credit-based system provides flexibility for students to personalise their studies but also create difficulty in checking their course choices against the programme requirements. In this paper, we present how to implement an efficient academic advising system that utilises a preference model to produce course enrolment suggestions to students. The model employs mathematical programming techniques to maximise the students' preference on the courses intended to take while complying with all programme requirements. Simple rules are defined for transforming programme requirements into model constraints so that little training is required for the administrative and academic staff. The model can be efficiently solved using commercially available mixed-integer linear programming solver within a fraction of a second. The system also presents the academic advices in a comprehensive format.