DEVELOPMENT OF A RESULT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY NIGERIA

Background of the Study
Okonigene et al. (2008) observed that the use of computers for information processing facilitates instant access to students’ personal and course information. For system support, storing course information such as course codes, course descriptions, credit units, and grade points for the purpose of automatic computation of the GPA are required. The system keeps up-to-date records of the entire student body in the Department and generates the graduating students list. To support procedures like registration, data upload, queries to the system friendly graphical user interfaces were developed for the ease of use.
Amadin et al. (2017) stated that Student’s Examination result is one of the most important elements in schools. These data must be processed under critical management, while requiring simple operations for processing the examination results. The need for student to have access to their result on time and accurately cannot be overemphasized. Scores from examination taken by student need to be returned to these student to enable them know their performance in the various courses written.

Also, students need to know what courses they failed in order to retake the exams. Staff in charge of student result processing is burdened with a lot of other academic works like lecturing, research, marking of exams and attending to other administrative task. These other duties tend to affect the timely, efficient and accurate processing of results. The effort expended in the process of registration of students and computation of their examination results is awesome. Quite worrisome is the fact that these processes are carried out every academic session, putting the operators in a continuous and ever demanding cycle.

The computation of examination results and registration of students is obviously an object centered activity, the student being the dominant object in this case. Hence, the need to evolve not just a computerized process, but an object-oriented software design and implementation that will effectively and efficiently capture all the important objects associated with the registration and examination result processing within the University and the interactions among the objects.

Bijoy et al. (2016) said that Resul.t Management System is an integrated application to automate the result publication procedure of an educational institution. It ensures that all the processes are carried out in time with no scope of human-induced errors. Efforts have been made to define the requirements exhaustively and accurately.
Computer or device connected to a network (such as Internet) and ready to use or be used by other computers or devices is online. Today, the technology is growing
rapidly; everything can be done with the help of internet. For e.g. reservation of the train or flights, online business, online banking etc. so, there should be a system where the students can view their results, perform certain operation like save, print etc. online. Apart from the individual candidate, they’re parents and relatives who wish to analyse their ward’s performance from anywhere and anytime.

1.2 Statement of the Problem
Generating and organizing data in a useful way is called data processing (Royce, 1970). In his paper, Ukem, (2012) stated that the errors associated with the existing manual method of processing of students results in most universities in Nigeria, make it not only desirable but imperative that computerized approach be used in measuring students progress. According to him, the manual methods being employed suffer a number of setbacks; they make the process to be time consuming and prone to error. They lead to examination results being published late, sometimes with wrong grades being entered and students GPAs being wrongly computed. This could lead to wrong conclusions in the awarding of class of degree.

Some problems associated with student academic record management include improper course registration, late release of student results, inaccuracy due to manual and tedious calculation and retrieval difficulties/inefficiency. According to him, the development of database concept is the answer to these problems, where the amount of redundant data is reduced and the possibility that data contained on a file might be inaccurate because they were never updated (Amar, 2009). indicated that publication of students’ results in the manual system takes a very long time resulting in the students remaining idle for long. Sometimes the delay in declaration of result causes heavy losses to the students as generally they cannot join further studies, or appear in competitive exams and jobs because of the non-availability of certificates on time.