Design and analysis of Data base

for

ISE Graduate Program

I have designed a database to facilitate inserting and managing data in ISE department located in North Carolina A&T State University based on the knowledge of Management Information System (MIS) and related methods. This database is designed to record, update, report and analyze academic data for ISE graduate students. First, a format for personal information was designed for each graduate students. Personal information includes banner ID, first name, last name, date of birth, gender, contact information, veteran status, race and disability. Faculty members are recognized by name, track, phone, email address and their research area. A course table is designed to list graduate courses with courses details such as course title, course number, credit hours and course description. Depend on master program type, master student information is recorded for master program by thesis and master program by project. Database administrator will be able to attach proposal, thesis and project documents for each master student. Research and teaching assistants will be recognized by their faculty members as supervisor. Each teaching assistant will be assigned to undergraduate courses. Both master and PhD students will have semester GPA (Grade point average) and total GPA. In other words, administrator will be able to update GPA for each student any time needed. For each PhD student, qualifying exam, preliminary exam and dissertation proposal will be updated with possible status such as pass, fail once and fail twice. PhD students and master program students by thesis will be assigned to three committee members which come from faculty table. Similarly, for each PhD and master program student by thesis, there are advisers with related information that come from faculty source. Finally, financial aid information in terms of amount of tuition waiver, stipend, award and scholarship is recorded for each PhD and master student. To prevent generating repetitive data for some records, I have designed gender, veteran, race, academic track, faculty name, master and PhD track drop – down button. All these tables (following figure) are used to make forms, queries and report. The usefulness of such database is to facilitate updating data for graduate students and related faculties in ISE department. This design prevents occupying excessive memory in PC and provide useful reports for managerial level to analyze and better decision making. Other applications such as data entry in network, authorization level and data visualization can be assumed for future improvement.

At the present, similar processes are being done by Microsoft Excel which is not appropriate. I used Microsoft Accesses to design relationships among Data tables to understand how primary and secondary keys are connected to each other. Depend on department requirements to analyze Graduate program processes, this Data base can be developed.