1.1 Introduction
Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System are vital recurrent procedures and processes in every university system that is inevitable. It is the university’s tradition to carry out these processes every first semester of every session, where each student is to know he/her performance in each of the course offered. These important processes provide the vital performance of student’s in each level in the university system. The aim of computer programming is to put these data files and documents in an interactive manner in a computer system. This will enhance valuable handling and processing of data, leading to improved management decision making. Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System not only enables students to request for their grades, the system also provides avenue for course registration and delivery of students grades to their phones as soon as the grades become available. The system enforces security with the use of secret information (password), and also provides access to new and old grades.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
1.2 Background of Study
Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System is a set of software programs that is designed to control the institution’s (practically using Federal University of Technology Owerri), storage, management, and retrieval of data (RESULT) in a database. Course Registration and RPSs are categorized according to their data structures or types. The Course Registration and RPSs accepts requests for data from an application program and instructs the operating system to transfer the appropriate data. The queries and responses must be submitted and received according to a format that conforms to one or more applicable protocols. When a Course Registration and RPSs is used, information systems can be changed much more easily as the organization's information requirements change. Use of manual imputation of result is discarded and new categories of data can be added to the database so easily without disruption to the existing system.
The challenges encountered that led to the execution of the research work is that, the existing system problem has been delaying or delayed the results of graduating or graduated students that has made some of them not to go for youth service when they ought to or ought to have gone and has even made some not to have gone at all. To bridge this gap or solve this problem, there is a need to develop software that is accurate, error free as the problem has imposed so much stress on both exams and record and the management in Universities.
A database management system provides the ability for many different users to share data and process resources. But as there can be many different users, there are many different database needs. This brings about the use of computer-based Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System. Before the database management approach, the institution relied on the manual method of data processing and storage. Each file was specialized to be used with a specific application. Needless to say, file processing was bulky, costly and nonflexible when it came to supplying needed data accurately and promptly. This study therefore, examines clearly the effect of the computer-based Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System towards the development of Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO).
1.3 Statement of Problem
Investigation revealed the problems of the existing Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System which entails that:
- There is delays in the release of results;
- Errors inherent in handling and assessment of answer scripts;
- Delays in marking answer scripts; and
- Cumbersome response systems − where they exist − for handling result-related complaints.
Most students do not remember what they have in previous courses because the manual result checker processes do not allow you to have a copy of your result. The manual system of result computing is only capable to attend to a limited number of result submitted by course lecturer.
1.4 Aim and Objectives of the study
The aim of the study is to design and implement an Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System Application Software for checking academic results. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to develop an application software that will:
- Provide an objective system for recording aggregating and computing students’ result.
- Enhance or improve the computer literacy of every FUTO student.
- Reduce crowd and queuing of student result checker and during course registration.
- Reduce the possibility of making error or mistakes during the result grading and computing.
- Generate result that is accurate, timely and error free.
- Provide a room to enter student’s result before senate meeting and after senate meeting.
- Provide a reliable solution to result processing that is corruption free.
1.5 Significance of Study
The project work will help in a good number of ways to ease the delay in manual examination processing. The software developed will help schools management to achieve efficient information management system. There are many other advantages, and some of them are listed below:
- It saves time during examination processing
- Database for course registration and examination result is maintained
- References are very fast and delays can be avoided.
- It allows easy access to stored information.
- Help in reducing the costs such as labor, inventory and stationary.
- Generation of accurate results/information on transactions is sure.
1.6 Scope of the Study
The scope of the research is focused on the Design and Implementation of Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System. The Automated Student Course Registration and Result Processing System software will be design to manage the result computing of only Mathematics and Computer Science Department Students from 100 to 400 level of Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO).
1.7 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials.
1.8 Definition Of Terms
Result Computing: This is the process of computing each student’s result in a course by each course lecturer to determine every student’s performance in their course. A student’s result consists the individual courses results of the courses registered by the student.
