Sms Viewing of Grades

E-STUDENT PROGRESS (SMS VIEWING OF GRADES)
FOR
BATANGAS STATE UNIVERSITY
JOSE P. LAUREL POLYTHECNIC COLLEGE
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND COMPUTING SCIENCES

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

SUBMITTED BY:
JEROME ERIC P. CAÑELAS
NIÑA IRESH M. PADILLA
JAQUELYN M. LIM

2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In preparation and pursuit of this system, the proponents feel that they are indebted to many benevolent individuals for their assistance. The developers wish to take opportunity to acknowledge the following.
First of all, the proponents would like to thank and praise the omnipotent Father for giving them the knowledge, courage, and strength to continue their aspirations.
To their school, Batangas State University (Malvar Campus), for enriching them with good morals and values.
To their family for extending their moral, spiritual and financial assistance.
To the College of Information Technology and Engineering for sharing their knowledge and skills.
To their dear panelists for all their suggestions and corrections.
To our beloved thesis adviser Ms. Sheila Marie Gocoyo for supporting and giving us strength to finish our special project.
To their friends who supported them all the way.
.

CHAPTER I
THE PROJECT AND ITS BACKGROUND

This chapter presents the overview of the system development study. It includes the introduction which contains the project background, objectives which elaborate the main and specific aims of the developers, significance or the importance of the study and the scope, limitation and its delimitation.

INTRODUCTION

Information technology (IT) advances as new products of technology does. People aim for better living thus they create new things that will is them. Commonly, IT is applied with business to gather higher income.
Technology today is moving towards the future of the wireless web. Mobile devices such as palmtops, handhelds and cellular phones are becoming the rage. People want these devices to do everything from accessing their e-mail accounts, utilizing the internet, accessing personal and corporate information among others. One type of service that is available today is a technology called Short Messaging Service (SMS).
Short Message Service (SMS) is a communication service component of the GSM mobile communication system, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between mobile phone devices. SMS is a very inexpensive method of communication one hundred sixty characters take up as much as rooms as a one second voice call. Messages are delivered immediately (or when the phone is turned on). Like e-mail, they can also be reviewed or stored in your phone for as long as you wish. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers.
Technology really takes a boost and really advancing continuously. Different technologies arise which make man eager to discover something new, and challenge everyone to make enhancement out of existing innovations. Moreover, technology plays a great role in society. In fact, it creates and improves system that further satisfies human wants and needs. Now, more and more technology embedded on objects is used in everyday existence such as the cellular phones. Cellular systems are widely used today and cellular technology needs to offer very efficient use of the available frequency spectrum. With billions of mobile phones in use around the globe today, it is necessary to re-use the available frequencies many times over without mutual interference of one cell phone to another. It is this concept of frequency re-use that is at the very heart of cellular technology. However the infrastructure technology needed to support it is not simple, and it required a significant investment to bring the first cellular networks on line. Privacy is a great concern in data communications as the advent of computers has radically change the way we communicate and exchange information.
3G HSPA of High Speed Packet Access is the combination of two technologies, one of the downlink and the other for the uplink that can be built onto the existing 3G UMTS technology to provide increased data transfer speeds.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

In the manual and old style of viewing of grades, students must personally go to the school in order to see their grades. Teachers manually copy the grades of students into the grade sheets and class cards. This makes the grading of each student much longer, with these the researchers decided to create a system that will make the viewing and printing of grades a breeze. The said system will benefit a lot of users in the university. The E-Student Progress is built in an interface that has SMS capabilities in-order for the student to view their grades using their cellular phones. The student’s must register to the system through text, in order to view their grades in their phones, every student will have their passwords or codes with the corresponding grades link to their registration. A cellular phone will be linked with the system to receive and send information to each student.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY The main objective of the study is to design and create an E-Student Progress system that will control the viewing of grades through text messaging.
Specifically it aims to fulfill the following: 1. To create a System that students can see their grades through SMS 2. To design and develop a system that can also print out the grades of any student 3. To develop a prototype by interfacing the pc to mobile phone for the processing of the proposed system. 4. To design a system that must prevent unauthorized access to the student’s grade in terms of: a.) Security b.) Confidentiality

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY For the University, it would give support to the fact that BSU can easily adapt with the latest technology today and that BSU has the capability to utilize technology to provide convenient and excellent service to the student using WAP technology.
The primary goal of the study was to design and develop a system for Students. It focuses on how to help the people in terms of easy access on information.
The study will be very significant for the proponents because it will enhance their skills at programming and system development. This will also serve as a yardstick for them to gauge how much they have learned and developed in their four years of stay in the University. Keeping time-pressed parents informed of their student’s progress and school activities has always been a challenge for administrators and teachers. Busy schedules, misplaced information, phone tag are some of the obstacles we face when trying to communicate.
ESP notifies parents about the progress of their child in school and information is sent via email and (SMS) cell phone text messaging. ESP was designed by a parent, instructors, and school administrator and it covers everything needed.
To the future researchers, they may use the results of this study as basis information to enhance their body of literature.

DEFINITIONS OF TERMS

3G. 3rd Generation, is a generation of standards for mobile phones and mobile telecommunications services fulfilling specifications by the International Telecommunication Union. Application services include wide-area wireless voice telephone, mobile Internet access, video calls and mobile TV, all in a mobile environment.

3G UMTS. Third Generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is one of two competing 3G technologies utilized in cell phones. It also digitized voice, video, and multimedia at data rates up to 2 megabits per second (Mbps). UMTS offers a consistent set of services to mobile computer and phone users, no matter where they are located in the world.

DATABASE. A database is a collection of information that is organized so that it can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. In one view, databases can be classified according to types of content: bibliographic, full-text, numeric, and images.

ESP. (E-Student Progress) is a very powerful stand-a-lone web-based software packages and was specifically designed to improve communication between parents and school

GSM. (Global System for Mobile Communications) is the most popular standard for mobile telephony systems in the world. The GSM Association, its promoting industry trade organization of mobile phone carriers and manufacturers, estimates that 80% of the global mobile market uses the standard.

HSPA. High Speed Packet access is a collection of two mobile telephony protocols. The term HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is commonly used to refer to UMTS based 3G networks that support both HSDPA and data for improved download and upload speeds.

HSDPA. short for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, is a new protocol for mobile telephone data transmission which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

PHP. Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document

Short Message Service (SMS). SMS stands for Short Message Service. It is a technology that enables the sending and receiving of messages between mobile phones.

T9. Which stands for Text on 9 keys is a patented predictive text technology for mobile phones, originally developed by Tegic Communications. It is software that comes pre-loaded on many mobile devices to make faster and easier to type text on numeric keypad.

WAP. (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including e-mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and instant messaging. While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies.

SCOPE, LIMITATION AND DELIMITATION OF THE STUDY

The E-Student Progress System is specifically made and tailored for the fast viewing of grades; the users of the system will receive their grades through their cellular phones. This system can update, add, delete, save and edit grades and other information of students; it can also make printouts of grades that can be submitted to concerned party. The system also checks for the daily transactions, number of successful and unsuccessful transactions; load balance of the cellular phone connected.
Different user accounts will be given to the users and the administrator. The system will store the accounts and the grade of the students. This will be of great help to the instructors. Also, the users can view different sections that he/she is grading.
The primary goal of the study was to design and create a program for Batangas State University. It focuses on how to help people/students in terms of easy access on information.

Chapter II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
In this chapter, the technologies employed to make the proposed system possible are briefly discussed. Also, the proponents’ presents the readings about some studies conducted that are related to the proposed system.

CONCEPTUAL LITERATURE

Computers are very important in the development and economic stability of every country. It is now the foundation to many systems in the field of information technology. Some routines generally performed by humans are now replaced with computers. It helps much in doing task easier, faster and accurate as well. Computer now is a medium for relaxation for young people.
SMS is essentially similar to paging, but SMS do not require the mobile phone to be active and within range, as they will be held for a number of days until the phone is active and within range. SMS are transmitted within the same cell or to anyone with roaming capability. They can also be sent to digital phones from a web site equipped with a PC Link or from one digital phone to another. An SMS gateway is a web site that lets you enter an SMS to someone within the cell served by that gateway or acts as an international gateway for users with roaming capability.
The SMS is a store and forward service. In other words, short messages are not sent directly from sender to recipient, but via an SMS Center. Each mobile telephone network that supports SMS has one or more messaging center to handle and manage the short messages.
The SMS features confirmation of message delivery. This means that, unlike paging, users do not simply send a short message and trust and hope that it gets delivered. Instead the sender of the short message can receive a return message back notifying them whether the short message has been delivered or not.
Short messages can be sent and received simultaneously with GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) voice, data and fax calls. This is possible because whereas voice, data and fax calls take over a dedicated radio channel for the duration of the call, short messages travel over and above the radio channel using the signalling path. As such, users of SMS rarely, if ever, get a busy or engaged signal as they can do during peak network usage times.
Ways of sending multiple short messages are available. SMS concatenation (stringing several short messages together) and SMS compression (getting more than 160 characters of information within a single short message) have been defined and incorporated in the GSM SMS standards.
The network operator needs to purchase its first generation SMS Center as part of the network commissioning plan. The initial SMS Center may simply be a voice mail platform module or a stand-alone SMS Center. It is not possible to make the SMS available without an SMS Center since all short messages pass through the SMS Center.
Because simple person-to-person messaging is such an important component of total SMS traffic volumes, anything that simplifies message generation is an important enabler of SMS. Predictive text input algorithms significantly reduce the number of key strokes that need to be made to input a message. T9, from Tegic, anticipates which word the user is trying to generate. Widespread incorporation of such algorithms into the installed base of mobile phones will typically lead to an average uplift in SMS traffic of 25% per enabled user. These predictive text algorithms support multiple languages.
The introduction of standardised protocols such as SIM Application Toolkit and the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) contribute to an increase in messaging usage by providing a standard service development and deployment environment for application developers and business partners. These protocols also make it easier for users to reply to and otherwise access messaging services through custom menus on the phone. While these protocols are only a means to an end and not new messaging destinations or services, they are likely to lead to 10-15% uplift in total SMS volumes.
Terminals such as smart phones make it easier for users to originate, reply to and otherwise access messaging services through the provision of a QWERTY keyboard, rather than the limited keypad on standard mobile phone.

RELATED STUDIES
SMS User Interface Result Checking System( Emmanuel Rotimi Adagunodo Obafem)of Awolowo University,Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria; Their system uses the short messaging service (SMS), which leverages the readily available infrastructure provided by GSM operators to provide a means of cheap and fast communication between the students and the university.
The project of Louisiana Tech applies a traditional system of grading and awards quality points for grades earned. Students can obtain their grades online thru the Bulldog Online Student System (BOSS) following the completion of each quarter. Specific instructions for access are published quarterly in the Schedule of Classes, on the Tech website, www.latech.edu, and reminders provided by the University Registrar’s Office during early registration. Students needing a copy of their grades after the reporting period may obtain them online thru BOSS by requesting an unofficial transcript, or specific letters of verification.
The system of Hernandez (ET, al) (March, 2003)”Registrar System for Student Grade Verification for Batangas State University”, provides an organized and efficient way of accessing grades of students. It is an easy tool for the students in getting their grades after every semester. The proposed study aimed to make an automated online distribution and verification of grades of students. This application was designed to answer the problems encountered in the manual method of grade distribution. It would be an answer to the time-consuming distribution of grades of the students. The study would be a great help to the organization, as well as who verify their grades in easier and effective ways. This study is anticipated to uncover the difficulties faced primarily of the students and by registrar personnel in grades processing.

RELATED LITERATURE

Aba, Balahibo, and Datinguinoo’s ” BSU Enrollment System Using GPRS “ (March 2006) was designed to implement and adopt the modernization of the school’s current enrollment procedures. This system development study was designed for the students to be able to enroll using wireless communication by means of GPRS.
The study of Cusi, de Guzman, Paglinawan and Villalobos (2003) on The Development of BSU WAP site focus on a simple software which enables users to get informed on the latest development in BSU for mobile phone user. Mobile phones with WAP capabilities can browse the internet site developed for mobile phones.
A study of Velasco, Rhea of Sta Theresa College in March 2003 was a system designed to formulate solutions to the problem and to organize and improve the process of grade verification. This system was capable of verifying grades of the students through electronic mail and is also capable of maintaining database files of student, updating through computerized system and eliminating errors.
The system by Acayan et al (2005) “Online Grade Verification System for Student of School of Informatics and Computing Sciences, offers an online student grade verification for SICS department... The proposed system was designed and developed to reduce the problems encountered by the students, faculty and registrar during the issuance of grades/class cards.
The study of Gutierrez and Ada (March 2006) was an Online Grade Verification System for Batangas State University. The system was designed to minimize the problems and time of the student in verifying their grades. Students can gain access to their respective grades using Internet technology. This study is made to provide advanced procedure in verification of student’s grades. This study aimed to eliminate the difficulties encountered by the students, registrars and faculty as well, with the suggested procedure. It provides application to develop and replace the one which currently in use.
The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has a project that uses an Online Verification of Student’s Grades. Students may obtain a print out of their grades from the Online Students Information System. In order for them to see if the system has their grades posted, they have to visit the Student Information System. This would require the Student valid Number and PIN number in order to log-in. They can obtain their grades by selecting Final Grades or Transcripts.
SYNTHESIS

The principles and information gathered from the Internet and other related studies conducted by the previous researchers aided for the better conceptualization and understanding of the proposed project.
The system study of Aba, et. al. (2006) entitled “BSU Online Enrollment system using GPRS” has a similarity with the proposed system. They both use wireless technology in accessing information. The system of Aba et. al. and the proponents proposed system are both designed to implement and adopt technology to the modernization of the school’s services provided to the students. The study of Cusi, et. al. (2003) entitled “Development of BSU WAP site”, is somewhat related and similar to the proposed study, both studies considered the development of WAP site for the mobile phones.
The study conducted by Acayan et. al. (2005) and the study of Guttierez , et. al. (2006) entitled “Online Grade Verification System”, is similar to the proposed system, in the sense that the system is made to provide procedure in verification of student’s grades. They are similar in their aims of giving the student an alternate way of verifying their grades. They only differ in the media used in verification. The system of Acayan et al (2005) and the system designed by Gutierez et al (2006), uses internet technology in verifying grades. The proposed system requires the use of mobile phone in grade verification of the students.
The system of Hernandez et al (2003), entitled Registrar system for Student Grade verification is related to the proposed system since the system was designed to answer the problem encountered in the manual procedure of grade distribution that is very time consuming for the students.
The Project of Louisiana Tech (BOSS) Bulldog Online Student System (2003) and the project of the University of Colorado are quite similar to the study; because they also have a security features to maintain the security and confidentiality of the student’s grades. The systems requires a valid identification for the students in order to log in. which in the same procedure for the proposed system.