DefinePK

Abstract

The rate of students’ truancy in our Universities especially in developing countries has become alarming. Efforts made so far to curb this menace, including the class attendance policy which stipulated a percentage of class attendance that a student must meet in order to qualify to take an examination in any course, have proved futile. This is due to the tedious and unreliable current way of taking attendance in our Universities using pen and paper. The advent of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has led to the development of digital attendance systems but the absence of a form of master controlled access to the attendance taking mode has made the existing ones unreliable. A digital attendance system with master’s e-identity card controlled access to the attendance taking mode was designed and developed using the RFID reader module and Arduino Nano 3.x board as the principal components. The constructed device was tested and the test results showed that the device was effective in taking class attendance of students. We, therefore, recommend that this new design of digital attendance system with attendance taking mode access control feature be locally mass-produced and used in taking attendance in the Universities of Countries where high level of students’ truancy exist.