Tools to select supervisor for final year project

Abstract

All students in the Faculty of Civil Engineering (FKA) are required to undertake a final year project as partial fulfillment of the Bachelor Degree. In this course, students are expected to conduct research activity independently with supervision from their supervisor. Thus, each student has to select an academic staff as his supervisor before pursuing this course. However, problem arises when there is an uneven distribution of students being supervised by each academic staff. Some academic staff may have no student to supervise at all and some may have too many students to supervise and may lead to ill-supervision. For many universities in the world, a fair distribution of final year project students being supervised by academic staff has become an important issue. Similarly, in FKA, problem of some academic staff are having too many final year project students to supervise is minimized via a program that was written in Visual Basic for application. The program will prevent an academic staff from being selected by the students when the number of students to be supervised by the academic staff has reached the limit allowed by the coordinator. Other features of the program are: the ability to limit the number of students being supervised for each academic staff, the flexibility to allow the students to change supervisor after a selection was made, the ability to keep track of the time and record log students’ activity using the program, and the ability to allow the students to check who their supervisors are, should they forget. The number of academic staff as supervisors has increased from 88 to 102 after the implementation of the system given the same number of final year project students. The system introduced has successfully controlled the number of students supervised by each academic staff.