Academic Orientation Supported by Hybrid Intelligent Decision Support System

It is common that in all academic systems the students must make decisions about the future by choosing among different alternatives that include professional profiles or modalities, elective subjects or optional, etc. These decisions can have a very important influence in the academic journey of the students because sometimes a wrong decision can lead to academic failure or its correction implies a time cost for the students. It is remarkable that in many academic systems these important decisions have to be made in early stages in which the students do not have enough maturity or knowledge to be conscious about the consequences in their future if a wrong decision is made. Ideally these multiple choices, offered to the students, want to facilitate the acquirement of some professional and valuable competences to obtain a job. Taking into account that the suitability of people in jobs or studies is not only restricted to their taste or preferences, but also other factors involved in the process of acquiring maturity as an adult who develops any function. These factors such as capacities, skills, attitudes concerning the task, social attitudes, taste, preferences, etc. (Briñol 2007, Robertson 1993, Salgado 1996, Shevin 2004), must be taken into account in such processes. Initially these decision making processes were made by the students themselves or with their parents support according to different criteria such as, preferences, future job market, even randomly, etc. Therefore, in order to improve this situation different countries introduced one figure, so-called advisor, whose role is to guide the students in their decision making situations regarding their academic future. The academic orientation process carried out by these advisors imply the review of different information regarding the students in order to report which academic alternatives suits better their skills, competences and needs. In most of academic institutions the advisor deals yearly with several hundreds of students with different skills, personalities, etc. To make an idea, in Spain, and depending on the high school, advisors can manage from 200 to 800 students. This number of students implies a big search space to find the relevant information that can facilitate the orientation for each one in a right way, making very hard to perform successfully the academic orientation process. Hence it seems suitable the development of automated tools that support the accomplishment of the different processes of academic orientation to improve the success of advisors’ tasks. An overview of different problems in the real world that deal with search spaces drove us to pay attention to the situation raised some years ago with the advent of Internet and the