Background of Study

The emergence of electronic-data (e-data) processing system is an answer to the dire need for tools and alternative ways to improve man’s well-being and activities as a whole. It has relieved workers of the stressful routine of collecting, organizing and managing data. According toNmajuet al (2013), apart from teaching and researching which are the primary activities inhigher institutions, there are other important activities such as managing of students’ data, tracking of students’ progress at each level, as well as other administrative and managerial activities. In the developed countries of the world, these activities are automated. This, however, is not the case in the developing countries as evident in Nigeria where most institutions still adopt the manual method of managing students’ data which is time consuming and demanding, and are often prone to a variety of errors and disasters. Hence, there is a need to properly address these shortcomings. The solution to these shortcomings lieson an efficient information management system which has transcript generation as one of its modules.

According to Microsoft Encarta (2009), a transcript is an official document showing the educational work of a student in a school or college. It is used when there is need for official academic actions to be taken such as inter-departmental, inter-faculty or inter-university transfers, proficiency awards and higher academic pursuit. It must display the students’ full name, academic program and the university’s name along with transcript legends/keys/grading scales  printed on the reverse side that explain the course numbering system, credit types, grading systems, institutional scholastic indexes, abbreviations and symbols, special credit notations, and transfer credit as well as other relevant information.  Transcript generation is done by the student’s department and forwarded to exams and records department for final processing and authentication.

In this research, we aim to design a web-based automated transcript generation application. The ability to update and maintain the system without distributing and installing the software on a lot of client computers is a major reason for our choice of a web-based application. When adopted, the application will help the department in quick generation of students’ transcripts on demand due to the rapid increase in the number of students making the manual transcript generation process an uphill task for the record officer.

1.2             Statement of the Problem

In many institutions, proper handling and management of students’ academic report is of immense importance as mistakes and misplacement of any of these documents can cause a great havoc on the lives of the students involved. It is a challenging task requiring concentration as well as good calculation abilities. However, this process is still being handled manually inComputer Science Department of NnamdiAzikiwe University, Awka which we have set as the case study. It is associated with tremendous problems such as:

a.                  Grave errors, omissions and/or mutilation of students record

b.                  Involvement of a lot of paper documentation which takes up storage

space

c.                  Delay in searching through students files whenever record is needed

d.                  Insecurity of files as they can be subject to forgery, destruction by

rodents and fire outbreak which can damage all the documents in just a matter of some minutes

e.                  Too much work load on few numbers of staff thus resulting to stress.

Hence, an alternative approach is required to address the aforementioned problems and provide a cost-effective solution. Black (2007) has seen the need for the automation of transcript generation process and thus concluded that it is the beginning of the end for paper transcripts after surveying certain issues, the solutions and the pros and cons of both methods. An automated transcript generating system that provides means of converting the transcript to a PDF format and securing it with password is a solution to the identified problems.