A Decision Support System for Major Selection using an Analytic Hierarchy Process
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Abstract
Attending a university, the students need to select a major that suits them best. Nevertheless, several students have faced with a problem of selecting the major. This problem is caused by a decision-making factor overload. To overcome this issue, this article proposes a decision support system for major selection of Information Technology students. The model is based on an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) of decision factors. Decision-making factors for major selection, which are evaluated by experts, are classified into two groups called personal factors and external factors. Personal factors include future career interests, passion, aptitude, competency, subject content interests, and grade point average. External factors are future career opportunity, career path and security, and future incomes. Information Technology students have four choices for major selection: Enterprise Software, Management Information Systems, Communication, and Information Studies. Data for model evaluation were obtained from 159 senior students of the class of 2013. The evaluation results reveal that the model achieves 86% of recall. This indicates that the model has potential to help each student select a major.
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