The student records department of a well-known TAFE institute is having problems with its computer system. The system is on a network running under the Windows NT operating system and has been developed using a combination of Microsoft Access and Visual Basic. The following areas are causing concern:

a) Any PC being used to query the database will freeze fairly often for no apparent reason and it is necessary to reboot and start again, causing subsequent loss of information recently entered.

b) There is no facility to produce a report on an individual student’s results by using their student number only – it is necessary to go through a long process to find the one you are looking for. This is extremely time consuming and frustrating as this is a query which needs to be run quite regularly.

c) Teachers do not have the facility to enter students’ results directly into the system – they have to go through a long, slow procedure to get the results entered by the student records department staff. This can result in the students having to wait lengthy periods before their results are available, which in turn causes frustration and, in some cases, complaints. This is not good for client satisfaction! It is also more likely that data entry errors will be made as the teacher knows what is a “reasonable” result and so could correct many errors immediately, rather than having to wait for a printout, determine the errors, if any, and resubmit the corrected marks to go through the same process again.

Thanks Vozz

A: It is probably timing out from a failure response on pinging. Due to a faulty database.
B: A new interface must be created for the database. With the primary key being the student id. The interface should be fairly simple, with the needed field simply the student id number, which would then cross reference another data base and find the appropriate student information. (My freshman year of college we created a gradebook program to do just that)
C: Invest in an actual grade booking program. Have a site license registered, distribute to all teacher. If you wish to know of good gradebook programs, send me a personal message, my mother is a teacher she uses tons.
-Matt