These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

OPI Sign up Utility



The Center for Language Studies (CLS) at Brigham Young University offers courses in over 40 different languages.  In addition to offering language courses, the CLS serves other language departments in the College of Humanities by administering a capstone exam to language majors before they exit the program.  This exam is called the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI).  Students sign up for two dates and times when they are available to take the OPI and receive a test schedule during those requested times.  

The OPI is a phone interview with a certified tester and measures the speaking proficiency of students.  Typically, the interview takes 30 minutes to complete.  In a normal semester, the CLS will test roughly 400 students.  The student administrators at the CLS spend a lot of time retrieving test requests from a Google Doc, entering the requests into a third-party website, and notifying students about their scheduled test times.  Additionally, the student administrators send a reminder email to all students who will take the OPI the following day.  This is to help students avoid paying a $55 no-show fee if they arrive late or don’t arrive at all.

The system built for this project automates the majority of the test arranging process so that student administrators have more time to build various reports and serve the adjunct faculty for the CLS.  The system performs the following: (1) retrieves sign up information from the Google Doc, (2) requests all new tests on the third-party website, (3) sends a reminder email to students who will be taking the test the next day, and (4) stores the newest test requests in a database.  The student administrators have the option of performing all or only some of these functions through the use of various buttons.  




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