VCAA VCE Results Website 2004-2008

April 2003 - December 2008

Solutions involved

• ASP.NET
• Digital Strategy
• Usability Engineering

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority are responsible for reporting the VCE Results of all eligible students in Victoria. Areeba helped build the VCE Results website making it stable, secure and easy to use.

History

The Victorian Curriculum & Assessment Authority (VCAA) is a State Government agency which reports directly to the Victorian Minister for Education and Training. VCAA's responsibilities include the co-ordination and continual development of the curriculum for Victoria's VCE student population. The charter also covers key areas, such as student learning and the monitoring of student achievement as well as ongoing curriculum developments.

Challenge

Areeba were asked by VCAA, to develop and implement a website that allowed students to obtain their VCE/VES results online. It had to be easy to use and enable timely and accurate delivery of results with a high peak load.

In addition, the website had to support the administrative procedures of VCAA enabling results to be loaded, tested and displayed as well as being able to produce statistical data and reports of student behaviour. The site also needed to link to the VTAC website which was separately developed and hosted and which provided student ENTER results.

Solution

The VCAA results website was divided into two sections, public and administration. The public section was accessed by students with a valid Student ID and PIN while the administration section was designed to allow authorised VCAA staff to upload and view statistics.

Areeba's goal was to develop a website that was both stable and secure, that allowed students to easily login, view their results and print them and allowed for an expected load of 20,000 student logins per hour. The underlying technologies used were Microsoft's .NET Framework, SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2003 IIS 6.0, while the hardware setup to included load balanced web servers and a separate database server.