Introduction

Advising is an essential part of academic preparation. It is supposed to map out how students navigate the different program scenarios toward attaining their academic objectives. Academic advising is achieved through an adviser, who is usually an experienced faculty member. He/she would help students design their program of study. Advising starts with students seeking information to make informed choices. It may extend to trying to help students pinpoint where the emphasis should be put and how it is related to students' future employment, in addition to being a mentor for students. The actual encounters span the whole spectrum of future academic courses. Advisers may be full-time faculty members, career counselors, or administrators.

The genesis of advising started with the introduction of credit-based course systems. In the beginning, the students who graduated with a lock-step educational program needed support in selecting courses and devising a program of study. Advising became a necessity after the introduction of the term-based study program. Therefore, to ensure students make selections that reflect their personal preferences within reasonable bounds of the delivery system, advising became an important element in students' academic life. In other words, advising is a crucial part of a student's support network on campus. This was not to any degree foolproof. The faculty adviser may render faulty advice or not have enough know-how on how the system operates. Whether advising is centralized or distributed reflects how focused the advising process is. Sometimes, the institution finds it to the benefit of the program, administration, and students to have centralized advising through a single adviser. Other times, the advising load is distributed among all faculty and allotted students become advisees. Obviously, centralized advising will deliver uniform advising or as close as humanly possible, while distributed advising is cheaper to run but laden with inconsistencies and errors. Through new technologies, students can now access information that, in the past, only their academic advisers could supply; students can monitor their academic progress, access academic records, and gain timely and useful information about internships and co-ops, education abroad programs, and research and leadership opportunities that will round out their classroom experiences.

Chickering's theory (1969) asserted that students who sense the social climate have a fair sense of direction. They can strive to integrate their vocational needs and personal aspirations with higher-order social needs. The individual will conceive him/herself in the broader picture of things. This social function of the university climate will work hand in hand with the guidance given to students through the advising process. In addition, academic advisers help students through their guidance and positive influence to stay the course and fulfill their goals (Crockett, 1985; Tinto, 1987). Kulik, Kulik, and Schwalb (1983) studied the effects of four types of programs on the retention of college students. The four programs included (a) study and academic skills instruction, (b) academic advising and counseling, (c) academic support programs, and (d) enrollment in developmental and remedial courses. They found that students who participated in these program had on average an 8 percent higher retention rate than those who did not participate in the programs. There is no proof, however, that this is significant.

Light (2001) stated in his book, Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, that “good advising can have a profound impact.” King (1993) added that advising can impact the whole institutional community. This interaction with faculty members can positively affect a student's “intellectual, academic, and personal development” (Alexitch, 2002). This is an outstanding revelation. The study in this current article did not come to the same conclusion; although it can be understood that student-faculty interaction can be exhilarating or “enlightening,” this is far from being a rule.

Thomas (2003) analyzed student advising through a set of questionnaires and interviews of subjects. She tried to find an ideal blend between the two methods of advising in which the adviser helps the student choose a program of study or through guiding students personally, which is known as pastoral advising. There were no conclusive or proven results presented. It is true, in this perspective, that finding an ideal blend of the two methods would be the goal of a conscientious adviser.

Newell (2003) reviewed many cases where the adviser would not do a proper job in advising the students. Improper advising may occur when delivering inaccurate or misleading advice. Other symptoms may be utter lack of knowledge of the course offering, relationships, prerequisites, or inadequate understanding of the case at hand. This uninformed advising would eventually lead students to waste their time taking non-required course work, make wrong career choices, or create an inappropriate program of study. In addition, Alexitch (2002) discussed the availability of university representatives who would help students to make a connection between their in-class learning and out-of-class experiences. Winston and Sandor (2002) provided a tool to the academic advising profession, the Academic Advising Inventory (AAI), under the auspices of the National Academic Advising Association and its website, as a means of promoting good practices through thorough, theory-based evaluation. The instrument measures the advising in terms of formative and summative evaluations.

Many years earlier, Kramer, Taylor, Chynoweth, and Jensen (1987) discussed the new issues of changing advising with the use of computers. This seems to be the natural evolution, since the core of advising is delivering information, and computer technology is the technology of information dissemination, among other things.

Burnett and Oblinger (2002) presented lessons from institutions with the best practices. The first lesson is that services are shifting from student interactions focused solely on “transactions” to student interactions concerned with the “customer experience” and building lifelong relationships. The aim of advising is to exchange information through direct human interaction and experience sharing. “High touch/high tech environments are creating the opportunity for institutions to redefine their service relationship with students” (Burnett & Oblinger, 2002). Sometimes this environment utilizes enabling technologies such as the Web. In addition, institutions are experiencing a culture shift and are devoting renewed attention to how student services are delivered. As a result, they target processes that would enrich the student experience with intensive information content and accessibility to achieve desired outcomes.

Problem Statement and Methodology

Advising seems to lose justification for students. In essence, advising is sometimes viewed as a ploy by faculty to entice students to seek faculty opinions or to be used as a lever of power politics in the institution. Modern trends, as will be discussed later, show that this is not the case. The practice of student academic advising (not counseling) suffers from a number of inconsistencies.

A survey of sixty-seven faculty conducted at the Sultan Qaboos University and other private colleges in Oman indicated that a small percentage of students (less than 2 percent) actually seek their advice. The faculty could not pinpoint the reasons behind this “apathy” with certainty; they, however, cited reasons such as students prefer to confer with their peers and make choices based on their peers' experiences. Another reason might be that in this day and age, information is accessible and abundant, and a reputable institution would have its by-laws, regulations, and policy manuals on an online portal. The students may find it easier to seek advice from an accessible electronic information base. In addition, most of the computerized registration systems are intelligent enough to reject choices that are deemed unacceptable (like prerequisites), and many systems provide advice on alternatives. However, it was necessary to investigate this issue more closely.

A Web-based questionnaire was designed and e-mailed to a sample of students, from which 230 responses were received. The response summary was revealing and pointed to areas that reflect the next challenge facing academic institutions. It was decided that a straightforward description of the outcome statistics would suffice to shed light on this phenomenon. Another questionnaire was distributed to students to investigate their opinions and experiences.

It is obvious from the conceptual figure above that students decline seeking advice as they progress in their academic years, but at the same time, they show an inclination to give advice to younger students. In other words, the real engine for advice delivery is the student body itself, as shown by the sheer volume, and to an extent the quality, of students advising students; they are the practitioners.

Conclusions

Results of the first questionnaire reflect a high percentage of students feeling disgruntled toward the advising experience. This is coupled with the fact that advising has lost its effectiveness (about two-thirds of the faculty surveyed indicated that their advising skills are low). In addition, the survey showed that there is a need to revamp the academic advising process, in terms of content and approach. The institution may be able to save substantial resources by automating the process of advising. Advising seems to dispel the implication that it involves counseling. The results show that a student's level of understanding is high enough to eliminate the need for for advisers to provide purely technical information. An experienced academic adviser is no longer needed to the extent that was practiced in traditional academic institutions, where students were unclear as to their choices. The programs are well defined and the information is accessible with increasing clarity and details.

Accessing the technical content calls for automating the advising process using current information technology. One form of this advising is through Decision Support Systems (DSS). There is a need to develop a shell or template whereby each institution will fill in the necessary content, like regulations and rules. Students seeking advising can access the resulting application. More than 60 percent of the students indicated that they will be able to manage without direct contact with an adviser. A smaller percentage indicated that their aversion to advising was merely a result of the time wasted trying to contact the adviser, as time is a rare commodity. A transformation of the advising process to go hand in hand with the vision of a student-centered learning environment is becoming essential as elaborated by Spanier (2002). He indicated that human contact is not easily replaceable, as it involves multi-faceted experiential exchanges. He also suggested that technology is here to stay and will continue to expand in its contribution; advising could use a bit of both!

Advising becomes a misnomer. Students are more adept at navigating through the maze of course work without the intense need to be advised as to the required course of action. It stands to reason that information about program intricacies should also be available online. The technology is already available to make this option feasible.

Advisers are sometimes unable to keep up on matters related to advising techniques and details, especially when advising is distributed across an institution rather than being centralized. Students, on the other hand, especially seniors, are more adept at delivering a more realistic set of program choices because they have actually gone through the system. In addition, system development, which is usually discussed in college committees and faculty meetings, lacks the input of such seasoned students.