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> Teachers Rage at SAPS, Sistem Analysis Peperiksaan Sekolah

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TSPolaris
post Aug 15 2011, 03:11 PM, updated 13y ago

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Shame on SAPS

I REFER to recent articles on the Sistem Analysis Peperiksaan Sekolah (SAPS) or the web-based school assessment system. The delay in entering the examination data is not the fault of the teachers as I am aware of the problems.

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There are also not enough computers in school and this results in teachers, who like my wife, resort to using the computer with an Internet connection at home. Teachers are not paid allowances for using their personal computers to carry out school work.

Just from observing my wife who is stressed out everytime the system crashes, it is evident that the system is not well designed. Some of the key issues that need to be urgently addressed are:

Insufficient processing capacity

QUOTE
The number of online users is displayed on the login page of the system. When the number of users exceeds several hundred, the system starts to crawl and then crashes.

Some teachers wake up in the early hours of the morning or stay up late at night to complete the data entry, when there are fewer users online. They are obviously tired the following day and are unable to focus on teaching.

The system needs to be upgraded in terms of memory and processing capability, to handle the many thousands of simultaneous users.


System instability

QUOTE
Many times, the data already entered into the system goes missing after a crash and has to be keyed in all over again. My spouse has had that experience no less than four times! Imagine the teachers’ frustration and the time wasted. The system’s database needs to be looked into and replaced with a robust version that can handle high volumes of simultaneous transactions.


No data validation

QUOTE
The software is poorly written and does not validate information during data entry. This means that a simple mistake, for example, leaving the MyKad number of a student blank when an update is attempted, causes the system to crash with a cryptic error message that only an IT professional can understand. This causes the teacher to panic and start all over again.

Let me share with you that all first-year undergraduates in Computer Science are taught how to set up a student database, very similar to what this system is trying to achieve.

It is a great shock that such basic principles of software design such as data validation is not implemented. Changing the programme to validate the data and providing an online message to correct the data before updating will solve this issue.


Lack of security

QUOTE
The login page and subsequent pages are not secured as every web page is presented in “http:”. This means that the data transmitted by these web pages can be intercepted.

It presents a frightening security issue, especially since they are entering personal and sensitive students’ data via unsecured web pages.

At the very least, the site must be equipped with secure web pages, most often denoted by “https:” which encrypts the data, similar to what is being offered by all Internet banking sites (and even Facebook, if you choose the right security options).

I shudder to think of how much of our taxpayers’ money has been invested into this problematic system.

I hope that for the sake of my wife and thousands of other teachers and schoolchildren, the weaknesses of the system can be urgently looked into and corrected.


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