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Student information system requirements: a checklist for colleges Student information system requirements for colleges: the lifelong record, academic rules, transcripts, ABC and APAAR links, access and results-day load.
A registrar asks for a transcript for a student who joined through lateral entry, failed two papers in the third semester, took a year off and came back into a different batch. The old system cannot produce it, so someone builds it by hand in a spreadsheet. That transcript is the real test of a student information system, and most requirement documents never mention it.
In short: a college student information system must keep one lifelong record per student, model programmes, schemes and batches as they change, apply your credit, grading and progression rules, issue results and transcripts, connect to ABC, APAAR and DigiLocker, control access by role, and stay fast on results day.
This guide covers the student record itself: what it must hold and which rules it must enforce. Choosing which ERP modules to build first, and whether to buy or build, are separate questions with their own articles. The aim here is a core record that holds up for as long as a student is with you, and long after they leave.
The student record: one person, many enrolments The most common modelling mistake is treating a student as a row with a programme, a batch and a semester column. That works until a student changes programme, repeats a year, is readmitted or studies two programmes. The record needs to separate the person from their enrolments and from what happens in each term.
Person: legal name, name as it should appear on certificates, date of birth, category, contact details, guardians, identity references. One record, kept for life. Programme enrolment: which programme, scheme or regulation year, admission route (regular, lateral, transfer), batch, start and end dates, status. Term registration: the courses a student is registered for in each semester, including repeat and improvement attempts. Status history: active, on break, detained, withdrawn, readmitted, graduated, each with an effective date and the approval behind it. Name and detail changes: kept as history, with the document that justified each change, because certificates must match. A minimal relational shape shows the idea. Real systems add many columns, but the separation matters more than the detail.
CREATE TABLE student (
id bigint GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
legal_name text NOT NULL,
date_of_birth date NOT NULL,
apaar_id text UNIQUE
);
CREATE TABLE enrolment (
id bigint GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
student_id bigint NOT NULL REFERENCES student(id),
programme_code text NOT NULL,
scheme_year int NOT NULL, -- regulations the student is bound by
entry_route text NOT NULL CHECK (entry_route IN ('regular','lateral','transfer')),
batch text NOT NULL,
status text NOT NULL,
starts_on date NOT NULL,
ends_on date
);
CREATE TABLE course_attempt (
id bigint GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
enrolment_id bigint NOT NULL REFERENCES enrolment(id),
term_code text NOT NULL,
course_code text NOT NULL,
attempt_no int NOT NULL DEFAULT 1,
credits numeric(4,1) NOT NULL,
grade text,
UNIQUE (enrolment_id, term_code, course_code, attempt_no)
);Note scheme_year. When a programme revises its syllabus, students admitted earlier usually stay on the old scheme. A student who drops back a year may move onto the new one, with an equivalence mapping between old and new courses. If the requirements do not say how that works, the system will not support it.
Academic rules the system must enforce Every institution has a regulations document. The SIS has to turn it into rules that run. Ask the examinations office for the regulations of every scheme still in force, then make sure each of these is answered in writing.
Credit structure per programme and scheme: core, elective, open elective, skill and value-added courses, and the minimum credits to graduate. Grading scale and the formula for SGPA and CGPA, including how failed, absent, audit and withheld results are treated. Pass criteria: separate minimums for internal and end-term marks, and whether grace marks or moderation apply. Attendance eligibility: the threshold for sitting exams, and who can condone a shortage. Progression: how many backlogs a student may carry into the next year, and what happens when they exceed it. Repeat and improvement attempts: whether the best or latest grade counts, and how it shows on the transcript. Maximum duration: how long a student may take to finish, and how breaks are counted. Multiple entry and exit, where offered: which certificate, diploma or degree a student earns on leaving at each point. Write each rule as a worked example with real numbers, not a sentence. "A student with 5 credits of backlog in year two may progress; with 6 they may not" is testable. "Students with excessive backlogs are detained" is not. These examples become the acceptance tests for the build.
CGPA is a good place to start. Under the UGC choice based credit system, SGPA is the sum of each course's credits multiplied by its grade point, divided by the total credits. A student with a 4-credit course at grade point 8 and a 3-credit course at grade point 6 has an SGPA of (32 + 18) / 7 = 7.14. Now ask what happens when the 3-credit course is failed: does it stay in the denominator, and does the later pass replace it? Your regulations will answer that, and the answer changes the figure on every transcript.
Results, transcripts and documents Documents are what students and employers actually see, so this is where errors become complaints. The requirements should cover each document the institution issues, who can generate it and how it is verified.
Grade cards per term, consolidated mark sheets and the final transcript, each in the exact format the university or board approves. Provisional certificates, degree certificates, migration, transfer and character certificates, and bonafide letters on request. Result publication with a controlled release: marks entered, verified, locked, approved and then published, with no edits after locking except through a recorded revaluation. Revaluation and rechecking requests, fees, outcomes and the change history they produce. Verification: a QR code or reference number on each document that resolves to a record an employer can check. Upload of degrees and mark sheets to the National Academic Depository, which students access through DigiLocker. Integrations and national reporting An SIS in India no longer stands alone. Students carry an APAAR ID, institutions deposit earned credits in the Academic Bank of Credits, and the institution submits data to AISHE every year and to NAAC and NIRF when it applies. Each of those needs fields that are easy to leave out at the start and painful to backfill later.
National systems: APAAR ID capture and validation, credit uploads to ABC, document uploads to NAD and DigiLocker. Accreditation and survey data: enrolment by category, gender, programme and state of domicile, pass rates and progression, in the formats each body asks for. Affiliating university portals, where the college must push registrations or marks and pull back results. Internal systems: admissions, fees, hostel, library, the learning management system and single sign-on. Payment gateway for exam, revaluation and certificate fees, with reconciliation. For each integration, write down which system owns the data, how often it syncs, and what happens when the other side is down. Portal formats change from year to year, so ask for exports that can be adjusted by configuration rather than a code release.
Access, privacy and audit Student records hold personal, financial and sometimes health information, and many first-year students are under 18. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act applies to this data. Take legal advice on how it and its rules apply to your institution. The system can then support whatever that advice requires.
Roles scoped by campus, department and programme: a head of department sees their students, not the whole university. Field-level restrictions for sensitive data such as category, health notes, disability details and guardian income. An audit trail on marks, grades, status changes and personal details: who changed what, when, from where and why. Maker-checker approval for marks changes after publication and for name or date-of-birth corrections. Consent records and a way to correct or export a student's data on request. Retention rules: academic records are kept permanently, while some supporting documents and logs can be deleted after a set period. The non-functional requirements nobody writes down An SIS is quiet most of the year and very busy on a handful of days: registration opens, exam forms close, results are published. Those days should drive the sizing and the testing.
Peak load: state the expected number of students logging in within the first hour of results going live, and load-test against it. Publishing results as pre-generated, cached pages or files rather than computing CGPA on every request. Backups with scheduled restore tests, because an academic record that cannot be restored cannot be reissued. Mobile use: most students will check results and download documents on a phone. Bulk operations: importing marks from spreadsheets with row-level validation errors, not a single failure message. Data migration: a plan for bringing in historical records, including scanned registers for old batches, with reconciliation reports. Migration deserves its own line in the plan. Old data often has missing grades, duplicate students and courses that no longer exist. Decide early which batches are migrated in full, which only as final results, and who signs off that the migrated totals match the old system.
A checklist before you send the requirements out Collect the regulations for every scheme still in force, not just the latest one. Write five awkward student journeys end to end: lateral entry, year back, readmission, programme change and multiple exit. Turn each academic rule into a worked example with numbers. List every document you issue, with an approved sample of each. Name the owner system for each piece of data and every external portal you report to. Define roles and who may change marks after publication. State peak-day numbers and the history you need migrated. Ask each vendor to produce the transcript for one of your awkward journeys during the demo. If a vendor or your own team cannot work through those journeys on paper, they will not work in the software either. Settling them now costs a few meetings with the examinations office. Settling them after go-live costs a semester of manual corrections.
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