Problem & Objectives

This page frames the system in academic terms for the thesis writeup.

Background

Traditional classroom attendance is taken by manual roll-call or by passing around a paper sheet. In practice this is slow, error-prone, and easy to abuse (for example, "buddy punching," where a classmate answers on behalf of an absent student). Paper records are also difficult to aggregate, audit, or correct after the fact, and they provide no reliable trail of who changed what and when.

Problem statement

Schools need an attendance system that is fast to operate in class, resistant to casual fraud, and fully auditable, while remaining usable on the hardware teachers already carry — a smartphone. Existing options are often either expensive dedicated hardware (biometric or RFID scanners) or generic spreadsheets that offer no verification and no audit trail.

General objective

To design and implement a secure, web-based attendance monitoring system that allows teachers to record attendance by scanning student QR codes with a standard phone camera, backed by server-side verification and a complete audit trail.

Specific objectives

1. Digital identity — issue every student a unique QR code derived from an opaque server-side token.
2. Verified scanning — allow a teacher to scan a student's QR code and mark attendance only after the server confirms the student, subject ownership, and enrollment.
3. Fallback recording — provide manual roster toggles (Present / Absent / Late) and an evidence-based appeals process for cases where scanning fails.
4. Administration — provide administrators with full CRUD over sections, subjects, students, and staff, plus bulk CSV import.
5. Accountability — record every data mutation in an activity log and every attendance change in an immutable audit history.
6. Integrity controls — enforce role-based access, hashed passwords, login rate limiting, and a configurable time-lock on attendance edits.

Scope

In scope

• Web application for admins, teachers, and students (desktop and mobile browser).
• QR generation and camera-based scanning.
• Subject-level attendance with Present / Absent / Late statuses.
• Masterlist management and CSV bulk import.
• Appeals, audit logs, data export (JSON), and data reset.

Out of scope / limitations

• Native mobile apps (the app is a responsive website).
• Cryptographically signed or expiring QR tokens (tokens are static UUIDs, revocable by regeneration).
• Offline scanning (the scanner requires connectivity to validate).
• Distributed/high-availability deployment concerns such as shared-state rate limiting.

See Limitations & Future Work for the full discussion.

Significance

The system reduces the time spent taking attendance, discourages casual proxy attendance through server-side verification, and gives administrators a reliable, queryable record for reporting and dispute resolution — all without requiring schools to purchase specialised scanning hardware.