Project – Design and Implement an examination scheduling and venue finder

CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION

• BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Examination scheduling is a largely studied class of timetabling problem concerning the scheduling for testing student’s performance after several meetings with their lecturers within a specified period of time. A good examination timetable ensures that both student, lecturers and the school management are satisfied with the examination arrangement, making sure that all examination are scheduled within the stipulated time frame and both hard and soft constraint are well satisfied. For many decades now, educational institutions have adopted computer-based systems to support a wide range of administrative functions such as course registration, student record management, courses and examination timetabling, personnel and financial management. Timetabling problem in educational institutions is categorized in three groups: polytechnic examination, polytechnic course, and school timetabling. Polytechnic examination timetabling defines the exact day, time slot, and room that each exam is held. In other words, which exam is scheduled on which day, the time slot, and in which building, floor, and room it is held are determined. Setting up a conflict-free examination timetable poses a difficult challenge due to limited resources like periods and examination rooms. The main objective in the examination timetabling problem is no student takes more than one examination at any time period. This conflict can be regarded as a hard constraint and must be eliminated.

The need for automated information system for educational development cannot be over emphasized.     The assertion by many professionals that information is power is continuously gaining affirmation as the countries of the world continue to witness dynamic trends in information technology. The manual system of accessing and scheduling of examination time-table in higher institutions is always very tedious. The scheduling is done by the school’s exams and record department. The number of exams hall in the school and their various capacities must be put into consideration, if not there will be a clash of exam venues. For each of the sections, levels and departments, there will be a time slot for each of the examination day. Manually scheduling of this time is confusing and takes a long period of time to produce and excellent and perfect result that is free from clashes.

1.2    STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

An improper examination timetable may result in students’ poor performance as it may not let them enough preparation between two sequential exams. In addition, there are many exams to be scheduled, large number of students who have taken different courses, the limited number of rooms or exam halls are available, and some constraints such as no conflict in a single student’s exams make it very difficult to schedule experimentally. The scheduling problem created by these set of circumstances clearly poses an interesting intellectual challenge. This study explores this challenge and proposes solution to this problem. The following are some of the challenges encountered in the Manual Process of Exam Time Table Allocation;

1. The current manually prepared exam time table is always error prone and takes a lot of time to reschedule.
2. Manual system of planning and accessing this time table is stressful.
3. Actual class sizes are not captured and as such there is error in Venue Allocation.
4. Clashes in take place in cases of carryover students.

1.3    AIM

The main aim of the study is to Design and Implement an Examination Scheduling and venue finder.

1.4    OBJECTIVE OF STUDY

The world is changing into a global village and the quest for knowledge and information is increasing. The computing is fast dominating all the aspects of life and many academic institution activities. There is a need for an easy way for planning and scheduling the school examination and venue finder. To achieve this purpose, the following objectives must be put into consideration:

1. To develop an automatic computer aided system capable of generating an academic school examination time-table scheduling
2. To develop a venue finder system for each student in a personalized format which will in turn reduced the stress on the staff, students and the exam committee board on scheduling their exams and allocation.
3. To guarantee that all examinations are scheduled based on courses offered by students and location of their hall for all examination without hitches.

1.5    SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

This research work is greatly hoped to eliminate the manual way of scheduling examination time table in the school venue finder. It will more also eliminate stress in planning of the time table. It will also avail the students to go for their worship at Sundays. Students will now write exams comfortably with good venue and much time and more also eliminate examination clash.

1.6    SCOPE OF STUDY

This project work is meant to cover examination scheduling and venue finder for school of Information Technology (SIT) in federal polytechnic Nasarawa, Nasarawa state. The system is web based so it will be hosted on a server and run on a browser. For the purpose of this project, the system will be hosted on a localhost. The system has a login page which restricts access to unregistered users, an interface for the registration of courses and classes.

1.7    LIMITATION OF STUDY

No research work can be carried out without certain constraints either in form of finance or logistics. This research is not an exemption and as such as money factors serves as constraints in the process of carrying out this research. Below are little of the constraints encountered.

• TIME: Given the time required for the submission of this research work, the necessary attention was not given to the study coupled with the work load of any final year student.
• FINANCE: Financial resources are not readily available to carry out an extensive and thorough research and the work is a tasking exercise, which requires a lot of financial commitment. Unfortunately, the money required to carry out this thorough work is not always available. As a matter of fact, finance was a constraint in this research especially with the harsh economic condition.
• POWER SUPPLY: there has not been consistence power supply in the area, thereby making the work not fast.

1.8    DEFINITION OF TERMS

• Lay-men: A person who is not a member a particular profession.
• End-user: A person that users a software developed by another person
• Allocate: to distribute resource for a particular purpose.
• SIT: School of information Technology.
• PROLOG: A high level language programming language base on logical rather than mathematical relationships.
• Constraint: something that limits freedom of action.

Linear Programming: A method of finding maximum and minimum of a linear transformation using variables that are subject to constraints.

Project – Design and Implement an examination scheduling and venue finder