The students indicate their responses to statements made about the module, lecturer and themselves on a defined scale. They can also comment on the module’s strengths, weaknesses, its tutorial and laboratory sessions, as well as put forward any other personal opinions.
A student may wish to submit their views without their name and signature on the back of the form. This will preserve their anonymity, thus encouraging honest opinions.

After collecting all the monitoring forms, the lecturer of that module must summarise all the students’ feedback and their remarks on a summary sheet. This is a slow, tedious and repetitive task.
The summary is then returned with all the students’ submissions to the Head of Department.

The current system possesses other problems besides the cost of a lecturer’s time for manual processing:
The lecturer does not know if all students studying the module have submitted a form.
The lecturer does not know if a student has anonymously submitted their form more than once.
Students who are absent from that lecture will not have the opportunity to provide feedback.
Students who answer N/A to questions can mislead the final averages.
There is an increase in paper consumption.

An on-line Student Monitoring System is to be designed and implemented to operate on the Internet.
It is to electronically process the submission of the student monitoring forms and automate the task of summarising the results for the lecturer.
The design of the user front-end is to be similar in appearance and function to the original student module monitoring document.

The project aims to provide the following benefits:
To electronically handle students’ questionnaire forms.
To maximise the number of returned module questionnaires.
To ensure that students do not submit more than one form per module.
To allow accessibility to give feedback for students who were absent from the lecture.
To compute an appropriate average for each question.
To process graphical and statistical results from students’ submissions for the lecturer.
To conserve paper as much as possible.

The system is to be developed as a series of CGI scripts running in sequence via an Internet web browser.
The scripts are to be written in Perl 5.0. Perl is like an advanced version of UNIX C-Shell scripting but its syntax is similar to the C programming language.

On Monday 18 October 1999, I was awarded the Computer Science Department Prize for best Third Year Project during academic year 1998-1999: http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Department/Event (case sensitive).