We developed a low-fidelity prototype of a report that contains an
algorithmically-generated optimal academic plan. Optimal is defined as the
minimal set of community college courses that satisfy the transfer requirements
for multiple universities a student is preparing to apply to. We recruited 24
California community college transfer students to participate in a research
session, consisting of an experiment, survey, and interview. We experimentally
compared the prototype to ASSIST, California's official statewide database of
articulation agreement reports. Compared to students who used the prototype,
students assigned to use ASSIST reports to manually create an optimal academic
plan underperformed in optimality mistakes, time required, and usability
scores. Moving to our non-experimental results, a sizable minority of students
had a negative assessment of counselors' ability and willingness to manually
create optimal academic plans using ASSIST. Our last results revolved around
students' recommendations for supplemental software features to improve the
optimization prototype