COMPREHENSIVE RESULT COMPUTATION TOOLKIT WITH BORDER SCORES MODERATION

Abstract

At the end of every session, level coordinators, departmental, and faculty examination board members at the University of Jos faced with the challenge of checking each level’s senate format results to ensure that it conformed to the standard set by the University. Some of the items checked includes: Scores and the corresponding grade points and grade letters, Total Credits Register (TCR) and Cumulative Total Credits Register (CTCR) by each student, Number of Semester spent (NSS), preparation of summary pages, etc. In most cases, the results are not void of errors, despite the arrays of board members who have checked the results. To mitigate these deficiencies, a comprehensive user friendly result computation toolkit was developed. This toolkit is designed to meet up with the peculiarity of Senate format result for University of Jos, Nigeria. It computes and prepares senate format results, summary sheets for final year and non-graduating levels, border scores moderation, and senate course by course summary sheets. The tool automatically collates all missing results and affected students proactive before the results are presented to senate. This will help the level coordinators to contact the concerned staff about the students whose results were missing. The current practice in most universities is that students who registered a course and wrote the exam but did not receive a score are only aware of their missing results when the results are approved and pasted. This tool mail missing result requests directly to concerned lecturers. The proposed tool computes all cumulative and sessional performance indexes i.e. Grade Point Average (GPA), Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA), TCR, CTCR, etc. The tool automatically identified students whose TCR or CTCR was below or above the approved permissible limits, as well as students who had exceeded their residency period or were in their last residency period. The tool was developed using Python and compiled as a standalone executable window software. Hence, no installation of programming languages or their dependencies is required. More importantly, the tool includes a top level Graphical User Interface (GUI) for students’ course registration.  When a student logs into the system using his/her matric number for course registration, only the courses that the student is eligible to register will be available on the GUI. Hence, the cases of registering courses for which the student has not passed the prerequisites are eliminated. With this tool, no results are manually typed; all results brought by individual course lecturers for a particular department are hosted on one machine and then uploaded. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first tool developed that meets up with the peculiarity of University of Jos senate format result. The tool was used to prepare the 2019–2020 sessional results to date