SAD 2 - Assignment 4

The PRF and the SRIS

Above are a picture of the Pre-Registration Form or PRF and a screen shot the Student Records Information System (SRIS) used by the Institute of Computing during enrollment. The PRF is a form wherein students must fill in with corresponding information needed from them and most especially the chosen subject they want to enroll to. The SRIS on the other hand is a system used for the enrollment process of the university if I’m not mistaken which has the same purpose as the PRF of obtaining information from the students but which of course differs because of its automation. So one could question why use papers when there is already an automated system with similar purpose. To answer this question, I think the PRF is used as a draft for the system input. Just like in a project one has to have a plan on what to do and how to do or accomplish the project. The draft or the PRF specifically for this matter is just like the plan to start the enrollment process which gathers the information from the students. Also if there would be no PRF and the encoder will automatically encode the information and subjects from the students it would probably take much more time and would exhaust the encoder more. It is more practical to have a draft and afterwards the encoder could encode it with more reliable information since it is written directly by the student or the applicant.    

Upon enrollment a student or applicant should first fill out the Pre-Registration Form or PRF to enroll the subjects they want to take. The PRF contains the basic information that should be filled by the students namely their name, address, ID number and the name & address of employer (if applicable). Regarding these information I think they are just enough and practical for the enrollment. Having less information would mean less effort for the applicant because it would be tiring if there would be so much information to be filled in. After filling out this PRF, the student could now proceed to encoding. At this point the encoder gets all the information the student wrote on the PRF into the information system.

Comparing and contrasting the input form and the information system, both have similar purpose which is to obtain and record information of the students and the obvious difference is that one is manually done and the other is automated. Seeing the images of the PRF and the system, the fields of information are not the same in the first place. There are fields on the information system which are not found on the PRF and these are those specific details about the student. These fields could somehow make confusion on the encoder considering if he/she is new to the system because he/she would have to find where to encode specific information. The positioning of the fields could also somehow bring confusion to the user because it has different positioning compared to the PRF. It would be more user-friendly if the positioning of the input fields on the system would somehow be similar with the PRF. These inconsistencies on the two could bring about confusions and other setbacks in the future.