The Advisor's Assistant

Abstract

Commercial computerized advising systems are available and expert-system shells have been used to develop aids for student advising. However, these approaches can be expensive, may not run on inexpensive PCs, may not be flexible enough, and would preclude giving copies to students for analysis of their own progress. Advisor's Assistant was developed to meet these requirements. The program, about 2000 lines of Turbo Pascal 5.0, reads a file describing the curriculum and a file containing information about each course in the curriculum, creating a tree data structure in memory. The advisor can then request a specific student's file. The tree data structure remains in memory while the individual student's file is read, adding nodes to the tree specific to the student. With the complete information about the curriculum, the courses, and the student's records in memory, the advisor can request that various items of information be derived for that student. For example, a student credit audit prints out the courses taken and the courses remaining in the various categories required for graduation.<>