The effectiveness of FYPMS in increasing the quality of final year students project management

Abstract

Final Year Project Management System (FYPMS) was developed for the purpose of managing the DFT6014 Integrated Project course taken by the final semester student of Diploma in Information Technology, Polytechnic Malaysia. Course management needs to be done effectively as this course involves a large number of students and a large number of lecturers acting as supervisors and assessors. The existing management system uses a manual method, whereby all processes in the final year project management are recorded on paper. It starts with enrolling a student group for the final year project, identifying the supervisor for the student project group, verifying the student project proposal, performing the assessment and recording the scores manually. Based on the feedback obtained from the survey indicates the need to develop a web-based system known as FYPMS. This system has been implemented to assist the management and monitoring progress of final year project. Therefore, this study was conducted to identify the users’ (students, project coordinators, assessors and supervisors) perceptions of the use of FYPMS. Descriptive studies were conducted to determine whether the implementation of FYPMS could meet the needs of internal user especially lecturers at JTMK. Feedback from the use of FYPMS was collected from target group users using Regular Random Techniques, where 13 lecturers and 104 students were enrolled in the DFT6014 Integrated Project course through questionnaires. Data obtained from the questionnaire were analyzed to determine respondents' feedback using software version 15.0 SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). The results are then presented in table form and interpreted using statistical mean interpretation by Landell, 1997. The findings show that the average mean for students and lecturers was at high level of interest (3.81 - 5.00 points) and the scores are 4.85 and 4.61 respectively. Therefore, it can be concluded that FYPMS is capable to improve the quality of the final year project management as well as solving the problems that existed are particularly related to the calculation of student project evaluation scores. This makes the course management and evaluation process more efficient and systematic and saves cost, time and energy.