Design of an RFID-Based Student Attendance Management System for a Federal University in Ogun State

Manual attendance taking in Nigerian university lecture halls is time-consuming, prone to proxy attendance fraud, and generates records that are difficult to analyse at scale. This project designed and implemented an RFID-based automated student attendance management system at a federal university campus in Ogun State, South West Nigeria, targeting a departmental-scale deployment of 500 students. Each student was issued a passive 13.56 MHz MIFARE Classic RFID card encoded with a unique student identification number. An RFID RC522 reader module interfaced with a Raspberry Pi 3B+ ran a Python-based attendance application connected to a MySQL database over the campus local area network. An administrative web dashboard developed using Flask and Bootstrap displayed real-time attendance statistics, absenteeism alerts, and exportable reports. The system was piloted across 12 lecture sessions over four weeks. Results showed an average attendance recording time per student of 0.8 seconds, compared to 3.2 seconds for manual roll call, representing a 75 percent reduction. Proxy attendance attempts were detected in 100 percent of controlled test cases using card-ownership verification. Database query response time for 500-student reports averaged 1.4 seconds. System uptime during the pilot was 98.6 percent. Staff users rated the interface as intuitive on a 5-point scale, recording a mean usability score of 4.3. The study recommends expanding the system to include biometric fingerprint verification for higher-security contexts and integrating it with the university's existing student information system.

Keywords: RFID attendance, university management system, student records, Ogun State, embedded systems