Engineering Research Project Allocations

As part of the Master of Professional Engineering course, students need to complete a Research Project over two semesters. Students can commence their project either in Semester 1 or Semester 2. So, twice per year, the EMS Faculty conducts an exercise of allocating around 300 students into available projects. The current process is basically as follows:
  1. Academics are asked to send their available projects to Academic Services.
  2. Projects are advertised to all Master of Professional Engineering students via a webpage.
  3. Students are asked to submit 6 project preferences (ie the projects that they are most interested in completing).
  4. Students are allocated into projects based on: their preferences, WAM, discipline, capacity of project.
  5. Students and supervisors are informed of the project allocations. Students are advised to make contact with their supervisor.
  6. It is then up to the student and supervisor to discuss the scope of the project, schedule any regular meetings, and commence work as required.

It is step (4) above that is sometimes challenging. Currently, an MS Excel macro is run over a pre-loaded spreadsheet containing all of the available projects, and all of the student project preferences received. It would be great if a new piece of software/code is developed to assist the Faculty with allocating students to projects based on some criteria we set. The current process and system is OK, but could this be improved, perhaps via a stand-alone application?

Client

Contact Person: John Pougher
Telephone: 6488 7158
Email: [email protected]
Preferred method of contact: Phone or email
Location: Level 2 of the Civil & Mechanical Engineering building, area 2.01

Client Unavailability

None

IP Exploitation Model

The client wishes to use a Creative Commons CC BY-NC model to deal with IP embodied in the project.