Abstract: Engineering students face challenges of on-time successful degree completion. Universities incorporate academic advising as a solution to these challenges. Decision support systems enhance the effectivity of academic advising. Combined with machine learning, it can predict future student performance providing useful information. Compared to common ‘black box’ models, linguistic rules provide better interpretation and insight discovery. However, existing models often use positive predictors of academic excellence, with limited consideration on factors of negative effect. This work, therefore, generates linguistic rules for academic advising based on three predictors using rough set theory (RST) and then compared with artificial neural network (ANN) for benchmarking. Forty-eight samples of mechanical engineering students taking up machine design were considered. RST attained accuracy of 72.92% while ANN attained 66.66%. The model generated 13 linguistic rules, having reflected unrealized insights. The findings from this study may be utilized by academic advisers for pattern recognition, in identifying ‘at-risk’ students.