COMPUTERIZATION OF STUDENT LECTURE ATTENDANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Student attendance tracking had remained a persistent challenge in many academic institutions, especially when handled manually. These manual methods were often slow, stressful for lecturers, and prone to errors such as missed entries, impersonation, and inadequate documentation. This project introduced a fingerprint-based biometric attendance management system designed to address these issues and provide a faster, more accurate, and secure way of managing student attendance. The aim was to eliminate impersonation, reduce record-keeping errors, and grant real-time access to attendance data for school management. To achieve this, the system captured and stored students’ fingerprints in a secure database and marked attendance only after successful fingerprint verification. Data collection was conducted through interviews, surveys, and observation, allowing for a user-informed design. The system was developed using PHP for backend processing, MySQL for database management, and HTML/CSS for the front-end user interface. It also featured role-based dashboards that allowed course representatives, lecturers, and quality assurance officers to access attendance records relevant to their roles. Testing and implementation revealed that the system significantly reduced manual workload, improved attendance accuracy, and enabled analytics such as session tracking, student performance trends, and identification of students with low attendance. The results demonstrated that biometric integration offered a dependable and efficient approach to solving attendance management problems. It is recommended that institutions adopt similar systems to improve accuracy, enhance decision-making, and streamline academic administration.