Validity And Reliability Evaluation of an Automated Results Management System for Public Secondary Schools in Cross River State, Nigeria

The increasing volume of students’ academic records and the continued reliance on manual or semi-manual result-processing procedures in many public secondary schools create substantial challenges relating to accuracy, consistency, timeliness, retrieval and preservation of academic information. This study empirically evaluated the validity and reliability of an Automated Results Management System (ARMS) developed for public secondary schools in Cross River State, Nigeria. The evaluation adopted a quantitative software-validation approach involving criterion-related concurrent validation and repeated-processing reliability testing. Existing academic records of 300 Senior Secondary Two (SS II) students drawn from 10 purposively selected public secondary schools constituted the principal empirical dataset. Students’ Continuous Assessment scores and examination scores were entered into the ARMS and processed to generate subject totals, grades, overall totals, averages, class positions and broadsheet entries. For validity assessment, system-generated outputs were compared item-by-item with corresponding manually processed school records used as the reference criterion. Reliability was assessed by processing the same 300-record dataset on three separate occasions without modification of the input data. Results showed that all 300 ARMS-generated records agreed with the reference records across the six evaluated result components, producing an overall agreement rate of 100% and zero recorded computational mismatch. The manual and automated procedures also produced identical aggregate scores (ΣX = 18,735) and mean scores (M = 62.45). Across the three reliability trials, the ARMS repeatedly produced an aggregate score of 18,735 and a mean of 62.45, indicating complete output reproducibility. The study therefore provides empirical evidence that the developed ARMS possesses strong computational validity and deterministic reliability for the processing of secondary-school academic results under the evaluated conditions. The findings demonstrate the potential of appropriately validated educational information systems to improve accuracy, consistency and integrity in school result management. Large-scale deployment should nevertheless be accompanied by further testing of usability, security, scalability, fault tolerance and performance under concurrent-user conditions