Jurnal TICOM Vol.1 No.3 Mei 2013 ISSN 2302 - 3252 Page 173 Bar Code Scanner Based Student Attendance System (SAS) Hema Subramaniam 1 , Marina Hassan 2 , Setyawan Widyarto 3 Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Selangor, UNISEL, Malaysia 1 hema@unisel.edu.my 2 marina@unisel.edu.my 3 setyawan@unisel.edu.my Abstract— Student attendance play significant role in order to justify academic outcome of a student and school as overall. Unfortunately, there is no automated attendance record keeping application available in Malaysia’s secondary schools. A preliminary study has been conducted in one of secondary schools in Selangor, Malaysia in order to understand the manual attendance record keeping process. Through interview session, Student Attendance System (SAS) development team, have identified that teachers and school management face problems in recording and managing attendance of their students. Therefore, SAS has been proposed and developed. Need for a tool to systematically keep the students attendance record increased due to increasing number of school students. Upon completion of SAS, user acceptance testing conducted among potential end users. Result of UAT shows most of the user satisfied with the system with some minor changes required. Keywords— attendance recording, attendance reporting, bar code scanner I. INTRODUCTION Attendance record plays a significant role in the academic achievement of school students. Insufficient performance in school attendance leads to least performance in academic achievement [1]. A survey has been conducted in New York City public schools to study the role of school attendance as a mediator in relationship between student’s grades in school test. At the end of the study, they found that attendance as the full mediator for grades in the school tests. By knowing these facts, attendance of a student should be given higher priority regardless of any schools categories. However, attendance keeping process becomes tedious due to increased number of students in schools now days. In Malaysia, the statistics by UNESCO shows in the year of 2006 the secondary school population enrolment is about 3201. Conventional way of taking attendance will be no more relevant to be used with this increasing amount of students. Moreover, unavailability of proper attendance tracking tools make the situation some more worst especially in Malaysia’s secondary schools. Teachers have to spend lot of time in calculating the class attendance and to produce daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reports. Automated attendance record keeping tools needed by schools authority to keep track student’s attendance and to generate all the report required. A study has been conducted in one of the secondary schools in Kuala Selangor district, Malaysia in order to understand the manual way of attendance recording process. Based on the observation done, most of the teacher can’t trace their students attendance effectively due to very tedious calculation process is needed in order to comply with the standard set by Malaysia Ministry of Education. Based on the study we have identified that each class teacher will be provided with attendance book. Refer toFig 2 for a sample of secondary school attendance record sheet. Teacher call students name one by one and mark their attendance in the attendance sheet. Student’s name needs to be filled up by teacher every month. Type of calculation/report that needs to be delivered by class teacher illustrated in the Fig 1. Fig 1 Attendance Reports Attendance record is crucial and critical in determining the student academic performance [2]. This paper aim to discover the appropriate way to manage the attendance in school using computer aided tools. Paper divided into five sections. Next section discusses on the available student attendance tools and discovers the general functionality needed in order to develop Attendance total per day/month Absent total per day/month Attendance percentage per month School days in a month Total number of student exist in class per month Monthly attendance per student