Arab Educational Information Network

The study examines students’ knowledge and satisfaction of academic advising services provided by one Saudi university at the south of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Data was collected through a questionnaire followed up by an open-ended interview. Students labelled academic advising services as unhelpful or very minimal at best. Academic advising activities at the university proved to be mostly regulatory, done to complete registration and enrollment purposes. One of the main findings was that the current academic advising system fails to fulfil the students’ aspirations because of a dichotomy in the perceptions and expectations of academic advising between students and their advisors. Therefore, academic advising remains only prescriptive to fulfill an administrative or regulatory end. However, minor differences of students’ responses appear when the variables of gender, college and age are analyzed separately. (Published abstract)