FYP Proposal

Semester Management System

(SMS)

by

Anwar Zeb Khan, Rahat Ullah and M. Alamgeer Khan

Supervised by

Assistant Professor Rehan Ali Khan

Department of Computing Sciences

University of Science and Technology, Bannu

2014-2015

Date of submission: December 7, 2014

Proposal Summary

We aim to build a web based semester management system for our university. The system will let all the semester paper work automated in a central database for different departments. This involves managing the course marks/grades, semester results and automated generation of DMCs and transcripts of all the students. The students shall also be able to view their semester progress reports and GPA details online via internet, anywhere.

Background

All the data entries related to student marks during a course, calculation of course grades and semester result generation is currently done manually at our university. The operators have to pull in all the course marks of a batch to prepare the semester results. This is not only prone to human error but it’s a pain staking job and consumes significant time.

Not only this wastes precious time of the faculty, but also there is no online access for the students or the faculty members themselves to see a semester progress. All the course exams data is either written in black and white or is stored in excel sheets which are cumbersome to handle.

For different programs/batches in a department or for different departments, there is no online central database of student exam records. Such database, if existed, would have been very valuable in giving an insight of the overall progress of different batches or departments.

Objective

Our objective is to design and implement a web based semester management system to cater the problems discussed briefly in the background section. The basic idea of the system is explained below.

a. System Design

The system design comprises a web based control panel where a relevant administrator will be able to manage (add/view/edit/delete) the following:

1. Departments2. Study Programs3. Batches4. Semesters5. Courses6. Students

There will be different access levels assigned to the users of the system. They are:

1. System Administrator: This user will be able to perform all the functions available in the system.

2. Department Administrator: A department administrator shall have access to all the functions within his department only. This includes functions like managing the details of a study program, batches, students, courses, semesters, marks etc.

3. Course Program Administrator: A study program administrator will be able to access all the functions available to his assigned study program only. This includes managing the student course marks.

4. Data Entry Operator: The data entry operator will only be able to enter the marks details of a student during a semester. This excludes the option of editing or deleting any record from the system.

5. Student: A student may access his past and current semester progress details. The student cannot edit or delete anything from the system.

6. Guest: A guest is a user with no login credentials assigned. The guest may access the details of the different programs offered by the departments and their semester course plans.

The overall system will consist of a hierarchy of departments, study programs, batches, semesters, courses and students. There can be many departments, for an instance, Electrical, Computing, Software etc. Under each department, there will be different study programs like in Computing department, the study programs can be BS-CS, MCS., MS-CS etc. In each study program, students will be admitted in different batches like for BS-CS there can be a batch of 2010-2014, another 2011-2015 etc. In each batch, there will be a semester plan consisting of 8 regular semesters and summer semesters (depends when offered). Different courses are assigned to each semester and may differ for different batches. Students from a batch will be enrolled in each semester.

A study program administrator can be a professor for a particular course of study. He can manage the marks of all the students enrolled in that course. This includes managing the mid-semester, sessional and final exam marks. The professor may assign a data entry operator for this task whose access will be restricted only to entering the records. The system will keep track of the progress of all the students in that course. At any time, a student may be able to view his attendance and marks in that course. At the completion of semester, the course grade will automatically be calculated for each student. A student may forward a request for transcript to his department administration. The department administrator can login to the system and access transcripts of any student, readily available for printing. A detailed marked sheet may also be printed for any semester.

b. System Implementation

We plan to implement our semester management system in the form of a web based application. The front-end GUI will be done in HTML5 and jQuery (preferably using Twitter Bootstrap). The back-end scripting will be done solely in PHP and MySQL will be used as the relational database. Object oriented programming techniques will be utilized for easy maintenance, readability and scalability of the code. Great care will be given to make sure there are no security holes in the system which may lead to future exploitation of data and/or tampering. This involves rigorous testing in alpha and beta stages.

c. System Resources

A Linux Apache server will run the PHP code and host the MySQL database. For this purpose, the dedicated server of the university main web site will be used once the application is ready for production. In the testing phase, we will use our own local machine environment.

Also to ensure optimum use of the computing resources, the application will be tested for any memory leaks and/or extensive I/O operations. This will ensure less usage of the computing resources of the university server during operation.

Final Thoughts

The Semester Management System (SMS) will save tons of minutes in manual calculations, ease in access of progress reports and results and a secure centralized database for all the departments of the university. Allowing the students to remotely access their progress in a course and the end semester result will not only help students keep track of their progress during the course of a semester but will also alleviate the need of visiting the university time and again to see the semester result displayed on a notice board. The transcript generation time will be greatly reduced to just a single click.