A final-year student of the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Otobong Jerome, has developed a system designed to help secondary school leavers choose university courses suited to their academic performance.

Jerome, an undergraduate in the Department of Electrical/Electronic and Computer Engineering, developed the Automated Career Guidance Expert System to recommend suitable courses to students based on their performance in selected secondary school subjects.

The researcher said the project was motivated by the recurring problem of students choosing courses they were academically ill-equipped to study, often resulting in poor performance, prolonged programmes, repeated changes of course and withdrawal from school.

“The need for specialist guidance to guide tertiary education aspirants towards suitable courses of study has become pertinent,” Jerome said, explaining the motivation behind the research.

Unlike conventional career guidance software that relies largely on fixed rules, Jerome built the system using case-based reasoning, an artificial intelligence technique that enables a computer to solve new problems by comparing them with similar cases from the past.

To develop the system, the researcher assembled a database of 800 student records containing their performance in selected secondary school subjects and the courses considered most suitable for them. When a new student’s grades are entered, the system compares the results with the existing records and recommends a course based on the closest matches.

Jerome also tested the system using 200 student records that were excluded from the original database. The test, which used Euclidean distance and a neighbourhood size of 10, recorded a zero per cent classification error, meaning the system correctly identified the appropriate course pathway for all 200 test cases.

The system was subsequently developed into a MATLAB graphical user interface through which students or counsellors can enter academic results and receive recommendations without needing to understand the technology powering it.

Jerome’s supervisor, Engr. Chinedu Pascal Ezenkwu, said the research was particularly important because career guidance had received limited attention in Nigeria despite the large number of students seeking admission into tertiary institutions. “Grounding the case base in Nigerian students’ records rather than imported data was deliberate,” Ezenkwu said, noting that foreign educational data might not reflect Nigeria’s secondary school curriculum and admission system.

The research, titled Automated Career Guidance Expert System Using Case-Based Reasoning Technique, was submitted to the Computing, Information Systems, Development Informatics & Allied Research Journal. It was carried out under Ezenkwu’s supervision, with contributions from Engr. Enyenihi Henry Johnson of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Akwa Ibom State University.