DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF COMPUTERIZED STUDENT REGISTRATION SYSTEM

Description

ABSTRACT

This work introduces a computer oriented approach to the generation of Student registration Number in the registration process of a students in admissions in Institute of Management and Technology IMT Enugu as opposed to the Manual process that is currently in use. Although there may be a computer system existing already in the department used for staff and students services, it cannot handle the automatic REG. NO generation in the registration of the students since it was not initially designed for this, if there is, the computer, system may be making use of batch processing techniques. The loopholes in the existing system manual will be taken into account in designing the new system. All the systems specification required to put the system into operation will be considered. This online operation will be made to be user interactive. The programming language to be used for the systems design and development is Java using NetBeans 8.02 development environment. These system will be designed to auto generate Students Register Number which will serve as their unique ID in to the school. The system used an algorithm the will sequentially generate this REG. NO without a duplicate in them there by making the system efficient to its function and operations. This work is expected to eliminate the shortcomings of the existing system thereby being an explicit solution to implicit problems inherent in the system.

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 Introduction

In most Nigerians Universities, the process of registering all students as members of the institution is largely concentrated into a very short period of time. At the University of Newcastle, the registration period occupies a little over a week in September, at the start of the academic year. The purpose of the registration process is to determine which students will be taking courses within the University, and for the administration to keep its records uptodate. From the students point of view, registration enables them to acquire the necessary authorised membership of the University, and where relevant, obtain their grant cheques. It is usually the case that students will register for particular courses, or modules, at the same time, and the information collected is used by members of the teaching staff to construct class lists, etc.

Prior to 1994, registration involved students being registered in a single place within the University, where they would present a form which had previously been filled in elsewhere by the student and their department. After registration this information was then transferred to a computer system. In 1993, the University decided that the entire student registration process was to be computerised electronic registration for the Autumn of 1994. The decision was also made to decentralise the registration process so that the end users of the course data, the various University departments, would have more control over the accuracy of the data entered. It was also expected that the delay before the final data could be delivered back to the departments would be considerably reduced. Although the same registration forms were issued to students, available data concerning each student had already been entered in the system database. At the registration, using unique student number as a key, student data was retrieved from the database and updated as necessary.

Needless to say that the registration process is extremely important to the University and the students: the University cannot receive payments for teaching the students, and students cannot receive their grants or be taught until they have been registered. Thus the electronic registration system has a very high availability and consistency requirement; admissions tutors and secretaries must be able to access and create student records particularly at the start of a new academic year when new students arrive. The high availability requirement implies that the computerised registration system must be able to tolerate a reasonable number of machine and network related failures, and the consistency requirement implies that the integrity of stored data student records must be maintained in the presence of concurrent access from users and the types of failures just mentioned. It was expected that most human errors, such as incorrectly inputting data, would be detected by the system as they occurred, but some offline data manipulation would be necessary for errors which had not been foreseen. Tolerance against catastrophic failures such as complete electrical power failure, or a fire destroying much of the University infrastructure although desirable, was not considered within the remit of the registration system.

A solution that would require the University buying and installing specialist faulttolerant computing systems, such as Tandem 1 or Stratus 2 was not considered economically feasible. The only option worth exploring was exploiting the Universitys existing computing resources. Like most other universities, IMT has hundreds of networked computers Unix workstations, PCs, Macs scattered throughout the campus. A solution that could make use of these resources and achieve availability by deploying softwareimplemented faulttolerance techniques certainly looked attractive.

1.1 The Problems and its Setting

In our modern technological age, science strives as it can to alleviate the problems of man with a view of making like less tedious for him. With the advent of computers in the later forties which is regarded as one of the greatest scientific discovery, the problems of our society are gradually being reduced to their minimum level.

The aims of this project in a more improved and confined way is the use of computer in the registration of students in generating their unique ID Number Reg. No. by the Institute of Management and Technology IMT Enugu.

The design involves the steps to software development using Java and a development environment of Netbeans 8.0.2.

1.2Statement of Problem

The admission department of IMT has for long now been admitting students and assigning them Reg. No through the manual process, a process where the reg no will be assigned manually, corresponding it the existing one to see that there will be no duplicates in the previous assed ones, yet the still end up having duplicates.

The developed new system takes control of all the above mentioned problems efficiently.

The project has the objectives of making the registration exercise less tedious for the students and even the registering staff. It is also aimed at developing a system that will restrict unauthorized access thus providing strong security to stored information. One of the prior objectives of this research work.

1.3 Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to provide the overview of the existing system, sport the shortcomings, design and develop a new system that will be able to overcome these limitations of the existing system.

This project work has the intention of developing system that can provide fast retrieval, update and storage of information and data inclusively such that access to information can be done with a greater ease.

1.3Objective of the Study

This project work is aimed at producing a system that will eliminate the difficulties and unnecessary protocols inherent in the existing system. From the feasibility study the researcher took, he came out with an alternative which is much better in terms of cost effectiveness, time saving, reliability and clearity of output, with the objective of:

To design a system that will automatically generate Students Reg. No. Without duplicate.

Document students record when enrolled in to the school

1.4Significance of the Study

It is hoped that the result of this study will serve as tools for helping students to get registered into the school, and will go a long way helping the staff and the management 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 from the school.

Also, important is the fact that records prepared with electronic machine can be stored as long as needed in nonbulky 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 students services.

1.5Project Study Scope

This project work is set to design and implementation of computerized student registration system for automatic Registration Number assignment in the Institution of Management and Technology, Enugu. It covers only the REG. NO generation for fresh students.

1.6Limitation of the Study

Cost: cost is one of the limitation to this research work were it requires huge amount of money to put up this system with such functions, and the resources that it requires in order to run effectively

Maintenance: the new system requires regular service and maintenance were to make every necessary updates.

Power supply: Availability of stable, efficient and reliable power supply is also a source of limitation this project as it depend only on source of energy to keep functioning.

1.7Definition 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 Wed 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 Brower: This is a special kind of software that processes hypertext makeup 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.

System: Set of computer components that is, an assembling of hardware, software and peripherals functioning together.

Database design: The process of creating a design that will support emprise mission statement and mission required database e system.

Software: These are program for computer which allows certain specific task to be accomplished e.g. word process etc.

Hardware: Computer equipment used to perform input processing and system output activates.

Management information system: collection of people, database, and devices produced to use in providing routine information to manager and decision makers of the organization.