The Political Science Department allows its professors to hire student assistants (TAs and CAs) to help with grading student assignments and meeting with students. Each student assistant is allowed to work a designated number of hours each week per class. The department chair holds each professor accountable for monitoring the hours that their assistants work. At the end of the semester the Political Science Department's accounting secretary must compile a report that indicates three items: the number of hours a professor was allowed to use for the semester, the number of hours the professor actually used, and the variance between those two numbers.
In the past, the secretary spent eight to ten hours compiling this report because the information needed had to be gathered from separate sources and entered mainly by hand into a Microsoft Access database the department maintains. In addition the report was also prone to the introduction of human error and was usually not finished until months after the semester had ended.
To simplify and significantly speed up the process of creating the Student Hours report, we built a VBA program to run from the Political Science Department’s existing Access database. Using VBA code we are able to manipulate Microsoft Access, Excel, and Internet Explorer to gather data from the user, route Y, and the BYU Student Employment database known as BOB. This information is used to calculate the number of student assistant hours professors are allowed to use for each course over a semester and the variance between that number and the number actually used.
Our program is detailed in two parts. Part I documents how the program automatically generates the end-of-semester Student Hours report. Part II details the process of updating the Political Science Departments database by automatically importing the information from BOB.
Write Up Part I
Write Up Part II
Project File
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