Planning a system to handle school records Essay

Real user: The examination department of CAMS School has to maintain the student progress record. Part of the education process requires the examination department need to assess the students at regular intervals throughout the school year and keep a record of achievement for each student at the end of the year. The examination record should build up over the duration of the course to allow the staff, students and parents to see how the students’ are progressing. The examination officer Mr.Ahmed has asked if I can help them with a particular project to satisfy their need. The examination department and the examination officer Mr.Ahmed will be my end user. The problem and how I discover it: My friend Asad study in CAMS school. In May 2008 he gave his year 10 exams and left for his holiday without taking his result. On his return when he went to collect his result with me he found lots of mistake in the report card. The term marks of history and literature were written incorrect. He marked absent in mathematics. We informed the examination department about this blunder and asked them to rechecked and correct it. After two weeks the examination department could not done anything about the history and literature result as they had lost the record while they marked present him on mathematics paper. My friend was very upset with his result. Why Has This Problem Arisen? Cams school is keeping and making their school results manually, the manual files are prepared for each class and course and class teacher prepare result in register, from where they were shifted to big result sheet and then to report cards. there is no system in place at present to record assessment results efficiently and allow the staff to monitor the students’ progress throughout the year. Resultantly, the staff must find the time to meet these needs and are finding it difficult and time consuming to record and collate the assessment marks using a manual system. Some evidences of problem: * Every year many student complain as they were not satisfied with the result, as they complain that they had got different marks in monthly test and in term but in report card the marks appeared are different. So the recheck of the whole term marks are extremely difficult and time consuming. * Many errors like calculation in cumulative marks or wrong percentage were found in the report card which affected in not only on grades but also in their ranks. * Many test marks were either entered wrong or forget to enter. * In case of any urgent placement of faculty member, the term result could not collect from the teacher. * The teacher had lost the term result and there was no backup of it. * Some times student does not appear in the final term due to any medical grounds or any other uncertainty and they need to be promote on their past performance basis, in such situation , to find their past result of each subject is time consuming and problem as it is not visible in one page and the examiner and the teacher has to search User requirement: Mr. Ahmed wants me to develop a system which can perform following functions. * Develop a system for recording and storing all the assessments undertaken by students. * Record end of unit assessment marks for all the theory and practical units. * Record all the marks for the projects completed within the course. * Keep details of the student’s name, and year badge. * Total up the marks for the different subjects, calculate averages for each student and the group and allocate grades against level of performance. * Develop a system to identify high achieving students and those with areas of concern. * Show results of group performance in graphical format. * Be able to alter the system to record and process all the results. * The system must be user friendly. * The system should not involve any additional hardware or software costs. Having considered all the above, I have come up with my own List of Objectives that I must achieve in order to develop a robust solution to this problem. I will use these throughout my project to check that I have satisfied the requirements of the user. Objectives: > General objective: * The system must adhere to the working of old system whilst computerizing as much as possible. * The system should be automatic as possible, reducing the need of user intervention where possible. * The system should be secure. Unauthorized personnel must not be able to gain access to the details stored on the system. * The system must be stable and reliable; it must not breakdown or crash which may result in lost data. * Create a template that can be reused for each new year group * Produce graphs to show results graphically * Hard copy of reports should be formatted to be printed out on one page * Use color to identify certain groups of student > Qualitative objective: * The system should store detail of all student result and their marks. * The result should be easily identified, thus allowing the user to show the result of individual student. * Record of individual student can be maintained. * By making folder of each year each class result would be easily identified. * The system should automatically calculate the cumulative marks, percentage and graph of individual student in every subject, * The system should allow user to gain accurate result in calculation. * The user should able to enter all the data and easily view it. * Every part of the system must be accessible to the user with minimum fuss. > Quantitative objective: * The system should able to store the data of ten course and 15 children per class. * The data must be record and available to view with in 10 second. * Past result must be identified within 30 second. * Cumulative marks, percentage and graphs must be prepared within 30 second. * The user must be using the system within one week of receiving it without further help. Different solution of the problem: CAMS are already working with manual solution so it is useless to create any manual solution. My initial thoughts are that a solution could be developed using a Spreadsheet or Database package or maybe a Word Processing package. The following table identifies each of these applications, considering the function software can perform.