Using Recommender Systems for Matching Students with Suitable Specialization: An Exploratory Study at King Abdulaziz University

Abstract

—In Saudi Arabia, all high school graduates who want join local universities have to go through a preparatory year before selecting their specific specialization/major. One of the most concerning issues for those fresh undergraduate college students is the selection of their specialization. College specialization selection is critical for them, as their academic and career future will be affected by this decision. An unsuitable specialization selection will have unfortunate consequences, not only on the students’ future but also on the university’s resources and budget. This paper suggests a solution to this problem by introducing a preliminary study of a recommender system (RS), which will recommend the appropriate specialization for the students based on various tests and grades during the preparatory year at King Abdulaziz University (KAU). The proposed system guides students through their specialization selection process based on their abilities. The collaborative filtering technique was used to build the RS and K-fold cross-validation was adopted to evaluate its accuracy and performance. The results showed the prediction of a specialization for each student with good accuracy ratio. These promising initial results provide a feasible solution to assess this issue further in future studies.