Design and Implementation of Student Registration
System for Universities
Ying Liu1, Fuxiang Gao2, Yaqin Liu3
College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
Shenyang Jianzhu UniversityˈShenyang, China
liuying@ise.neu.edu.cn, gaofuxiang@mail.neu.edu.cn
Abstract—Student Registration System for Universities (SRSU)
as a kind of management information system can not only record
the information for student registration each term quickly and
efficiently, but also do statistics on the students' basic
information, registration information, and payment information
and give results of the analysis. The background of the subject is
analyzed in the paper firstly, and the technologies used in the
development are introduced. Then the implementation of the
system is given in detail. The upgrade and expansion of the
system are prospected in the end of the paper.
Keywords-MIS; ASP; Student Registration
I. BACKGROUND
Every term the student registration was an indispensable
part of work for the universities. Traditionally, the work was
done by artificial management, and the registration of the
corresponding classes was responsible by counselors from the
institutes of colleges. In the process of registration, the
counselor should stay in his office all day around, waiting for
the students to come to registration. The whole process of
registration was very simple. The counselor stamped on the
corresponding location of the student's student ID card each
term. This process was closed information, manual operation
and low efficiency. To sum up, there might be some problems
in the old registration process which is shown as follows.
(1) Traditional student ID card was made of paper, and
the entire registration process is manual operation
only. Therefore the efficiency of the registration is
very low, and some mistakes might be made when
the number of the students came to registration is
large. There was no record for the specific time of
student registration in the entire process, and if the
registration was record manually, the time for each
student might be much longer. During the
registration, the counselor spent most his time on the
registration, which is a waste of time.
(2) Nowadays in the universities it is common for
students not pay tuition fee. The reason for some of
them is not for poverty. The registration time is also
the time to pay tuition time. It is reasonable that the
students who pay the tuition can register. But it’s
hard to query in real-time on the information about
the payment from Finance Department. So the
students have not paid tuition fee can register the
978-1-4577-1415-3/12/$26.00 ©2012 IEEE
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same with the other students have paid their fees.
It’s unfair and lack of constraints on students.
(3) There were not relevant records in registration
process, after the registration, the registration
information was only shown on the student ID card.
It was difficult for the counselors to get the student
registration information at any moment, which
brought inconvenience for the management of
students. And if the college or institutes would like
to do statistical or analyze the student registration
information, it might be hardly impossible.
II. RELATED TECHNOLOGY
Management Information Systems (MIS) is the system
composed of persons, computers that can collect, transmit,
store, process, maintain and use information. It also can
monitor and organize the operations. It can use the past data to
predict the future, make decision globally, and help organize
and achieve its planning objectives by using information
control. The student registration can be considered from view
of MIS, and the problems above can be solved easily[1].
Therefore the design and development of the student
registration system for universities is imperative. This system
can coordinate the student management between the institutes
and the university. It is also in favor of the information delivery
and processing between various departments in time and the
information resources sharing among the departments. The
system simplifies the process of student registration, saves
manpower and resources for the university, and improves the
efficiency of student registration.
The Student Registration System for Universities (SRSU) is
designed and implemented using C/S mode. The system will
provide the student registration with information-based support
in the universities, which can make various departments within
the universities share the student information in real time and
obtain related data before making important decisions. The
student registration becomes orderly, convenient, efficient and
significant savings in manpower and resources due to this
system which has contributed to further information on the
internal management of universities[2].
A. C/S Mode
C/S mode is referred to as client/server. In a client/server
network, the server is the core of the network, while the
customer is the foundation of the network. The clients rely on
servers to obtain the required network resources, and the server
provides customers with the integrant resources of the network.
C/S procedures are generally used in the private network such
as LAN, which is more suitable for the environment of the
campus network. Because the C/S mode is generally for a
relatively fixed group of users, it has a strong ability to control
information security. It is appropriate to choose C/S mode for
the student registration system, which has some security
requirement.
B. ASP
ASP, namely, Active Server Page is a Microsoft technology
to replace the CGI (Common Gateway Interface). At present,
many Windows-based web site of the Internet began to use
ASP to replace the CGI. ASP is a script operating environment
located on the server. In this environment, users can create and
run dynamic, interactive web server applications such as
interactive and dynamic web pages, including the use of an
HTML form to gather and process information, upload and
download, etc[3].
There are some traditional methods to generate dynamic
home page according to users’ requests, such as CGI, ISAPI
and so on. CGI activates the response process based on
browser’s http request, while each request corresponds to a
process. When there are a lot of requests at the same time, the
system resources are preempted by the program, which makes
the efficiency low. ISAPI has been improved for this
shortcoming. ISAPI used the dll (dynamic link library)
technology, and took the thread instead of the process to
improve performance and speed. But the steps of development
are cumbersome for the thread synchronization problem. There
are still another problem in these two technologies and other
technology used commonly to develop dynamic web Java,
which is that they are hard to develop. The program
development and HTML coding are two completely different
processes, which needs specialized programmers to develop.
While relatively simple development technologies such as
JavaScript and IDC (Internet Database Connector), is limited
and inadequate in functions. ActiveX technology based on
open design environment is used in ASP. The users can define
and produce components to join the pages, so that dynamic
pages can almost expand unlimitedly, which is far more than
traditional CGI and other programs.
ASP is different with common technologies which
implement dynamic home page on the client such as Java
applets, ActiveX Control, VBScript, JavaScript, etc. The
commands and script statements in ASP are explained and
implemented by the server, while the web pages generated
dynamically by the implementation results are sent to the
browser[4]. The script commands on the client are explained
and implemented by the browser. ASP is explained and
implemented on the server, so developers do not have to
consider whether the browser can support ASP. They also do
not have to worry about other people download the program to
obtain the programming logic. The ASP program use ASP file
with the suffix. asp to achieve its function. An .asp file is
equivalent to an executable file, so you must put it into the
directory with execute permissions on the web server. When
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the user types .asp file address in the address bar of the browser,
the browser will send the URL request to the web server. If the
web server has installed the ASP, calls it to read the
corresponding .asp file, then interprets and executes the
commands. An HTML page generating dynamically returns the
web server, and then the web server sends the results to the
browser. The development of the ASP file is similar to the
HTML, and can be developed with HTML together in the same
process. By using the ASP the execute scripts will be able to
embedded into HTML file (The suffix of HTML file changes
to .asp), which makes the coding of HTML file together with
the development of the script. A very complex can be finished
by the object and the server component built in the ASP, and
users can also develop their own server components or use
other persons’ server components for specialized tasks.
III. FUNCTION DESIGN
Function modules of the student registration system for
universities can be divided into four roles, the administrator,
the student, Finance Department and Student Affairs Office.
The administrator is responsible for the maintenance of the
entire system data, as well as the statistical and the analysis of
data. The student uses the system to register just by brushing
the student card. Finance Department is responsible for
updating the information of the students’ payments and the
information of the students̉ loans. Student Affairs Office is
responsible for importing the basic information data of
freshman every school year. The use case diagram is shown in
Figure 1.
Registration Manage User
Student Administrator
Import Payment Import Freshman
Information Information
Import Loan
Finance Student
Department
Information
Affairs Office
Figure 1. System Use Case Diagram
(1) Student Registration: The student ID and other
information can be read from the student card through the
interconnection between the system client and the card reader.
And then the history of the student registration and tuition
payment situation can be obtained through the network. If the
condition of this student meets the requirements, he can
register in this term. But if the student has not paid for the
tuition or there is some unregistered records in the past terms,
the system client can output the report data. Then the student
can know the work he should do before the registration.
 (2) Student Information Query: There are two parts in this
module, Individual Query (i.e. common user query) and
Administrator Query.
Ԙ Individual Query: can only see the student̉ s own
record due to the restriction of privileges, and can not modify
the data.
ԙ Administrator Query: can see all the records of all
students in the system, and can insert, modify, and delete the
data.
(3) Financial Information Query and Import: including four
functional operations like query, insert, modify, and delete.
ķ Due to the large amount of financial information data,
the system only provides the import function, which can deal
with the EXCEL form directly and store the data in the back-
end database.
ĸ The insert, modify, and delete operations of financial
information can only be done by the financial administrator,
and the results are automatically stored in the database.
Ĺ The students can only query his own related financial
information, but can not do modify or delete operations.
(4) Statistical and Analysis: including two parts, the annual
statistics and the summary form printing.
ķ The student information, such as grade data and so on, is
analyzed in general by the annual statistics each term, which
involves large amounts of data operations, and analysis results
can be shown finally.
ĸ The page that the user is interested in or the analysis
results summary can be printed on a printer form in the part of
the summary form printing.
(5) User Privilege Management:
ķ There are two kinds of users, the ordinary user or the
administrator. The ordinary user only has permission to query,
but can not operate the data in the system database directly.
The administrator which has the highest authority of the system
can operate the system database directly. In addition, some
other information of the students can be collected in the
processing of the user registration.
ĸ The user access privilege is defined by the processing of
log-in which is the way to prevent unauthorized access. The
user must enter the username and the password when
registering the system.
Ĺ The user management is the manner for the
administrator to manage the registered users. The administrator
has the authority to modify and delete the ordinary registered
users, and add or delete the user's information.
IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
A. System Development Environment
Operating System: Windows 2000 Server (SP4).
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Web Server: Microsoft IIS (Microsoft Internet Information
Server) 6.0 supports ASP and can be used as both the
management system Server and the testing platform.
Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server 2000, provides
efficient storage process and a flexible user-defined functions
to support data integrity control in the core layer[5].
Client Development Tools: Visual C++ 6.0, creates a user-
friendly interface, interacts with card reader and transfers the
data with the web server.
B. System Development Language
(1) C++: C++ is an object-oriented programming language,
with good scalability and compatibility.
(2) ASP: script is the language expressed by the application
on a web page, which can be embedded in web pages. The
ASP scripts of our system run on the server to do the database
query, modify, and delete operations. In some of the ASP sites
the source code can be seen. If the ASP programmers write the
login password of the site directly in ASP code, once the
source is found, others can easily access this page that should
not be seen. And a lot of user name and password used to
connect to the database are written directly in ASP. Once the
data are found, it wound be quite dangerous if the database
allows remote access and has no fortification. The ASP file
storage directory of our system is set up to be unreadable, but
the ASP script can still execute normally. And this will avoid
the huge risk.
C. System Structure
The student registration system is built on C/S mode. The
system structure is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. System Structure on C/S Mode
D. Database Design
The Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is used as the database
server, because it can process a large number of information
data quickly. The ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is used
in the ASP to connect and operate the SQL Server database. In
terms of security, in order to protect the core data, the database
is encrypted. Even if some person finds the database file, he
can not open it because of the lack of the correct password. In
terms of performance optimization, the optimization design of
the tables and the SQL statement, the index and the adjustment
of the server running parameters, are used to improve the
efficiency of the actual operation of the database[6].
V. SUMMARY AND PROSPECT
The system includes several modules, the registration
management module, the financial information management
module, the student information management module, and the
statistical analysis module. The requirements of data
consistency, data integrity, data security are ensured based on
the requirement analysis of this system. The database structure
is designed and the related function modules of the system are
designed and implemented. The informationization, automation,
standardization of student registration management can be
satisfied by the system, and it’s the use of management
information system technology in related field. The system
work very well, and solve the manual operation problem of
student registration management effectively. Student
registration management for universities has a broad
application prospect in China.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by Classic Course Project of
Quality Projects.
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implementation of the management system of college students'
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Education Technology, Xi’an, 2011, pp. 535–537.
[3] Richard Kiessig, “Build Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable web sites using
ASP.NET and SQL Server”, Post & Telecom Press, pp. 122–151.
[4] Zhang Xiaoxiang, Xu Minghua, “Explain ASP.NET Infrastructure and
Case Development in Detail”, Tsinghua University Press, pp. 68–73.
[5] Delaney K., “Microsoft SQL Server TM 2000 Technology Insider”
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[6] Abraham Siberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan, “Database System
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