faculty/major. Decision Support systems can do this task through the provision of some of the questions asked in various fields to measure student capabilities in these areas and the intelligence level. Decision support system helps in making effective decisions as it allows us to do only right things. We have proposed a rule-based decision support system working like an expert system that contains a general rule-base and an inference engine. The inference engine retrieves rules from the rule-base to solve new problems based on the rules for similar problems stored in the rule-based system. In this way, a rule-based DSS can exhibit humanlike performance in that knowledge that can seemingly be acquired through experience [4]. We have developed our rule base DSS using CLIPS(C 
Language Integrated Production System) [7] language. CLIPS is a multi-paradigm programming language that provides support for rule-based, object-oriented, and procedural programming. CLIPS is a forward chaining, rule based production-system language, which is based on the RETE algorithm for pattern-matching. A command-line interpreter is the default interface for CLIPS language [2]. A few studies and systems have been published which advises the students in choosing a university. 

MyMajors [3] is a website which gives the student online advisement report on the suitable universities. The paper is organized as follows: section 2 describes the general idea of our rule base DSS and problem identification, section 3 presents knowledge base representation and CLIPS rules, section 4 presents student capabilities and evaluation test and intelligence level test while evaluation test and the result of the DSS is in section 5, and section 6 concludes the paper and outline direction for future research. At the end section 7 gives the references. 

## 2. Problem Identification

Different people have different specific mental abilities, and every university faculty/major needs special abilities and capabilities in their departments. So we need to measure the student mental abilities accurately and compare then with the university faculty/major required abilities and suggest a suitable faculty/major for the student so that he may be academically successful. For this purpose we need a decision support system/Expert System which will get student general background information like: student name, academic record, academic type and intermediate education passing year. Secondly the student's abilities and capabilities should also be checked through online abilities test to, thirdly we test the student's intelligence level by taking intelligence test. English language is the default language used in this test module. Applying the results of the test to our knowledge based system is the fourth step. Finally our DSS determines which faculty/major in general can be suitable for the student. 

## 3. Knowledge Base Representaion

Main sources for knowledge for developing this DSS/ES are human academic experts of Gomal university, the admission criteria of gomal University, the past record of the students and their future result. We have collected all the required criterions, abilities and capabilities for each faculty/major in Gomal University. We converted the knowledge into facts and rules in CLIPS syntax, and store them in the knowledge base of the CLIPS language. CLIPS is suitable for forward reasoning and can be used easily to build the rules and facts, so that is why we have selected the CLIPS language. 