1.1 Introduction
Online Admission and Result Checker System is an application software that checks students’ academic result and admission status in a selected academic session. For the system of admission and result checking system in a high institution, it had been stress on both the students looking for admission, students checking their results and the admission personnel’s of high institution, as a result of the manual way of handling admission and result checking. As a result of the automation age in which we are now, it will be beneficial to the high institutions in Nigeria by reducing fraud risk, stress etc which involve in the process of admission and result checking, if there will be online system of doing the above mentioned things.
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
Computers with the power of the internet have thrived in aiding communication among people. The telephone system, which is the main communication system that was invented several years ago, had undergone a great improvement, so much that today we have fixed wireless phones, mobile phones and the likes. With the rapid development of mobile phones come several services like the Short Messaging Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and others, which are readily available and add to the usefulness of mobile phones. SMS in particular is widely used in communication, and more recently has been leveraged to provide several services like airline ticketing, banking services, commercial services like share and sell (an added service provided by MTN Nigeria), where subscribers can easily share and/or sell airtime, and several others. SMS is a mobile technology that allows for sending and receiving text or even binary messages to and from a mobile phone. The relative ease of use of SMS makes it possible for a user to learn how to send SMS easily.
The background of the study is Covenant polytechnic Abia. Here is the brief history about the Institute from the school official website. In a bold attempt to fully top the potentials of the private sector in the areas of education, the Education (National Minimum Standards and Establishment of institutions) Decree of 1985 was amended in 1993 January as follows: An Institute of the Federation or of a state of by a local government or by any of the following that is: by company incorporated in Nigeria or by an individual who satisfy the criteria set in the schedule to this Act for establishment of institutions.
With this deliberate policy of government, Covenant Polytechnic was established as an answer to the cry of thousands of Benue indigenes who were either being eliminated out of other schools or could not gain admission into the only one existing polytechnic in the state and elsewhere. Thus, the Very Revd. Fr. Dr. Chris Utov came into the initiative to establish Covenant Polytechnic inorder to complement government’s effort in the education sector through private participation.
The Polytechnic accordingly complied with all statutory rules for the establishment of a private tertiary institution and obtained official consent and approval to operate in September 1996 from the state ministry of Education, Abia, Abia State.
However, Covenant has not been established as a “comparative pride” or as an “opposition academy” to any other in Benue State or elsewhere, but as a child of academic necessity and in answer to as well as in fulfillment of several contending and prevailing circumstances.
Schofield and Kubin (2002) argued that small devices could potentially provide better interface for finding information than through page browsing and other means. More than 160 billion SMS are exchanged each month in European countries (Mavrakis, 2004), and according to Resource Shelf (2006), 48.7 billion SMS messages were sent in the second half of 2005, which is up 50% on the six months before that. Nowadays, with 45 million short messages sent in Africa alone every day, a mobile phone that has the easiest interface for voice communication is likely to fail the user satisfaction test if it does not provide a reasonably good SMS interface (Gorienko & Merrick, 2003).
The major advantage of SMS is its cost effectiveness, and availability, as most individuals own phone. In different parts of the world, several service providers offer mobile services which include SMS. Most times the cost attached to sending a SMS is relatively small, and most providers do not charge when receiving SMS. Sometimes, service providers give users certain amount of free SMS per month, which allows customers send and receive unlimited number of SMS messages. It is possible to acquire a special dedicated line that uses a custom rate for messages sent to the number; it is also possible to have a number as toll free, making it free for users to send SMS to the number. All these contribute to what makes SMS a really cost effective means of disseminating information.
1.3 Statement of Problem
In recent times, there had been problems of admission processes which ranges from proud on the part of the admission personnel in which they engage in admitting their relations or whoever that gives them a huge amount of money to the stress encounter by the admitting personnel and the admission sicking candidate. Another problem is the expenditure involved both on the part of the candidate and the high institution in question a case study, COVENANT POLY Enugu. Also the use of take result to going admission is another problem faced by the existing system.
The already admitted students on their own part, encounters a lot of stress while checking their result and the institution also encounter a lot of problem in processing, printing and pasting of result. The problem includes the stress, resources wastage i.e human, materials and financial aspects.
Sometimes, as a result of typographical error, inadequate printing impression, tearing of pasted result by first students who first checked their result, leads to making some students not see their result in time which will make them to start going to the HOD for help. All these mentioned above and more are problems faced by the existing system.
Also, the difficulties student and staff of admission department usually force in any institution of higher learning made us to realize that (computer aid) an online admission system is the best that can happen to Covenant polytechnic Abia. This will save our school the embarrassment caused by students’ complaints at the end of the working day.
It was in the view of this that Sundison (1994) pointed out that “a typical problem students have had was moving from school to another school. In a modern society labour moves quite a bit and many students change schools at least once in their lifetime. Every time new students were offered admission into a school, there was a problem of which curriculum the previous school had followed and therefore whether the previous level tallied with those of the new school”.
Many students neither know their right nor left at the admission level in the institution. Admission had frustrated so many students that some even roles a lot of lectures in pursuit of registration.
1.4 Aim and Objectives of the study
The aim of the study is to design and implement an Online Admission and Result Checker System for checking academic results and admission status in Covenant polytechnic Abia. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to design and develop an application software that will:
- Minimize stress and resources involved in result checking.
- Reduce stress and resources involved in admitting students into COVENANT POLY.
- Make available results to student’s any place and any time.
- Make other school information available to those whom it concern.
- Provide instant retrieval and store of records and information
- Provide instant response to any adhoc enquires
- Ensure Proper accounting and file keeping
- Assist in result recording and CCPA updating
1.5 Significance of Study
It is hoped that the result of this study will serve as tools for helping students who wish to register for their NCE programmes, and will go a long way helping the staff also. This is easy to achieve since standard and tested computer programs handle all sort of complex calculations, storage and retrieval of valuable information needed for the school.
Also, important is the fact that records prepared with electronic machine can be stored as long as needed in non-bulky and compact systems. Works has been done in many areas of computerization, in industry and commerce but not much has been done in school administration and management system/services. We have therefore done this work to highlight the use of an online in the important area of student’s services.
1.6 Scope of the Study
This work is confined to the Covenant polytechnic Abia that is our area of research work. This was done to attain a standard output that will be useful to both students and as well as the staff of institute. It also helps in making a quick, accurate, efficient and reliable data processing.
As a result of inadequate resource such as time and information gathering facilities, this study will only focused on online admission and result checking system for Covenant Poly which is the case study of this project. This kind of project, does not only restrict to the above mentioned project, though there may be other ways of admission, but I will focus alone on the online system.
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
- Computer Network: Computer Network is a system that connects two or more computers together using a communication link.
- World Wide Web: World Wide Web simply called www is the most important tool of the Internet. It was created in the late 1980s in Europe and was used limitedly in academic cycle.
- Databases: A systematically arranged collection of computer data, structured so that it can be automatically retrieved or manipulated. It is also called databank.
- File Transfer: Any kind of computer file can be sent via the Internet from one Internet user to another. Table of accounts on spreadsheets, design by a graphic artists, music sound files etc, can all be exchanged in this way.
- Web Browser: This is a special kind of software that processes hypertext make-up language (HTML) document. In other words, a web browser is a computer program that interprets HTML command to collect, arranged and display the parts of a web page.
- Web Site: A website is a collection of many interconnected web pages organized by a specific college, organization company etc, containing web pages (good and commodities) on the Internet. Web site are stored on web servers. There are many web site and thousand of HTML pages on each web site. A web site is a treasure of information and entertainment.
- Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks are highlighted words and phrase you find on web documents that you can click on as to jump to some other documents or Internet services.
- Online: Connected via a computer attached to or available via a central computer network.
- Offline: Disconnected from computer network; describes a computer terminal or peripheral device disconnected from a computer network.
