DEVELOPMENT OF AN INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR STATE CERTIFICATION OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

ABSTRACT

One day all students will be graduated from university after finishing their studies. From that time, all people starting from administrative stuff and finishing to students themselves will deal with lots of paperwork. That kind of paperwork will be related to almost every aspect of the information: their diploma, grades, diploma topics, cooperation with advisers and etc. Adequately thinking, it will take lots of time if those individuals will consider dealing with this huge amount of work manually, by hand without any sort of automation. Here comes the goal of our project, to automate graduation process of last-year students, by minimizing the amount of paperwork that should has to be done. The expectation of our team in terms of considering user audience was to interest mostly administrative stuff and for university members in general, so that the project will bring lots of beneficial features for both sides.

Keywords: state attestation, development of system.

INTRODUCTION

Information systems increasingly cover various branches of life. Full or partial automation improves and adapts many processes. This also applies to many processes taking place in today’s leading universities. Information technologies are being successfully introduced into the educational process: students and university staff can easily get any necessary information, apply for participation in conferences and forums, put down and view students’ grades through their personal accounts, etc. with the help of the website. All this makes it easier to access information, speed up many processes related to documentation, and so on. At the present stage of the development of higher professional education in Kazakhstan, there are many tasks on the solution of which the future development of the country depends, therefore, improving the efficiency of the functioning of the university and its educational process is an urgent task facing all departments of the university. Automation and informatization of the university in modern conditions can significantly help to increase efficiency in making managerial decisions and improve the control of the educational process. One of the significant processes taking place at the university is the procedure for preparing and defending the final qualifying work. When implementing this process, a large amount of information is processed and many documents are prepared. However, there is currently no information system in universities that allows you to take into account, store and process the information that appears. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to create an information system for collecting and preparing documents for the final state certification of graduates, which allows automating the process of preparing and defending students’ final qualifying papers: to make it faster and more convenient. However, first we need to analyze similar works in different universities, but before we go further, we need to look at the definitions related to educational processes, namely about the state attestation commission and the process of defending diploma works in Kazakhstan. Final certification of students is a procedure carried out in order to determine the degree of mastering the scope of academic disciplines provided for by the state mandatory standard of education at the level of a mid-level specialist, carried out in time according to the working curriculum. The purpose of the final certification is to evaluate the learning outcomes and key competencies achieved upon completion of the study of the educational program of technical and vocational education. The State Attestation Commission carries out the final attestation of graduates in the accepted form (defense of projects or works; taking exams). The main functions of the state attestation commissions: a comprehensive assessment of the level of training of a graduate and its compliance with the requirements of the state educational standard, making a decision on the awarding of qualifications based on the results of the final state certification and issuance of the corresponding diploma to the graduate [1]. From the materials of the “All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference of Students and Young Scientists” 2019 year of release[2], we found two articles with a similar topic "Development of the database of the subsystem of the organization of the state final certification of graduates of the department of higher education"by A.D. Vybornov, S.Y. Kirillova and "Organization of the database in the subsystem of storage of course projects and reports on the practice of students of the department of higher education"by A.I. Roshchina, S.Y. Kirillova, both articles were written at Vladimir State University. There is also two articles from Tomsk Polytechnic University on the same topic "Information system for collecting, preparing and analyzing documents for the final state certification of graduates"by Rumyantsev E.A., Sultan kyzy A.S. [3]. After analyzing these articles, came to the conclusion that they are not suitable for Kazakhstan and therefore began to develop their own platform.

TECHNOLOGIES

First of all, we planned a design pattern and chose MVC because it is the most reliable and easiest to implement. We have PostgreSQL for the database, Java for the backend, Angular for the frontend. There are also many other technologies for system security and resiliency, such as JWT tokens for authentication, Cloudflare and ElasticSearch modules for anti-DDOS systems, and other security features for protecting personal data, and so on. After that, in order to provide convenient access for users, we must deploy it. We chose Amazon Web Services as our cloud platform because it is one of the cheapest and most convenient cloud solutions. Also, we must delegate each action or each entity to separate microservices. For convenience, there will be microservices for users, for organizers, and so on. All microservices will be interconnected using message brokers, in this case Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ.

IMPLEMENTATION OF STATE ATTESTATION SYSTEM

The project was aimed mainly to make the structure of graduation process more easier. Taking into account the fact that students, as well as university stuff were suffered from being the victim of manual work with lots of papers, the purpose of this project can be undoubtedly identified. There existed a problem with students’ cooperation: it was tough to find a team and join to others. Meanwhile, it was difficult for advisors to accept the team that are very dedicated to their topic and has truly chosen it. Considering the case of secretary members, they have been facing lots of issues with writing down each student information, including the name, mark, topic, advisor name, recipient name and etc. Also printing each paper consumes lots of time and energy. So here is the list of functionalities that our application is able to provide for the public:

• Admin page can see the list of teams with their topics, delete/edit them. Also can set the defence date and choose a commission members from available list.
• Student can create his/her own team, as well as join others.
• Advisor can create new topics for students and see the list of requests from students for his/her topic.
• Commission member is provided with an interface to note their questions and grade each student with marking them
• Secretary is allowed to see all questions asked from commission members, as well as see their marks. Aslo able to generate two protocols with different models, containing different information about student, his/her defence information and final mark.

As it can be clearly seen from the list above, our web application has 5 roles: admin, student, advisor, commission and secretary. According to their roles, they will be provided with different interface with corresponding set of functionalities.

Figure 1. Admin page showing list of teams

Figure 2. Commission page showing list of teams

Figure 3. Commission page asking questions and setting grades

Figure 4. Secretary page

Pressing the blue button "Grades" (Figure 4), there will be the average mark available from all commission for each team member. That being set, in total we have information about the questions asked for students during their defence, as well as their marks. Next step is generating protocols. Here we have 2 different models: Protocol following the form 1 standard and following the form 2 standard. Both of them can be easily downloaded easily from the page "Documents" (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Secretary page generating documents

As the result of the generated document, all the necessary information starting from student’s full name, faculty and education program, advisor and reviewer full name, as well as mark for the defence, asked questions and reference for the red/blue diploma. Here is the successfully generated protocol result

CONSLUSION

The process of preparing and defending the final qualifying work takes a lengthy time at the moment. A vast amount of data is processed and many documents are prepared throughout the implementation of this process. However, colleges now lack an information system that allows them to consider, store, and process the information that comes in. As a result, the goal of this project is to develop an information system for collecting and preparing documents for graduates’ final state certification, which will allow for the automation of the process of preparing and defending students’ final qualifying papers, making it more efficient and convenient. As the technology for implementing the project, we have PostgreSQL for the database, Java for the backend, Angular for the frontend. There are also many other technologies for system security and resiliency, such as JWT tokens for authentication, Cloudflare and ElasticSearch modules for anti-DDOS systems, and other security features for protecting personal data, and so on. During the development of the application, there were such problems as a lack of information about the process of defending work, since the university was new, he did not have an exact solution at that time. For further work, it would be possible to create a single web portal for all educational institutions of Kazakhstan, either by creating a single document format for all that will be generated by the site, or by alternating each university with its data each time requesting information from them. Summing up, a web portal was created for the state attestation commission of the Astana IT University, with the following features: collecting data about university students: full name; creating teams and joining others with sending request; choosing topic by sending request to the advisor; uploading documents required for conducting and defending the thesis; the integrity of the package of documents for protection, publication, the final score, drawing up reporting and statistical documents on the final grades of students. As a result, the entire paper process related to the state attestation has accelerated many times, now it takes only a couple of days instead of a month.

References:

1. The State Attestation Commission in Kazakhstan URL: https://adilet.zan.kz/rus/docs/V010001652_
2. All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference of Students and Young Scientists (2019)
3. "Information system for collecting, preparing and analyzing documents for the final state certification of graduates" by Rumyantsev E.A., Sultankyzy A.S. URL: https://earchive.tpu.ru/bitstream/11683/16954/1/conference_tpu-2015-C04-v2-002.pdf