Adopting a New Marking and Reporting System (MaRS) at Faculty Level: A Survey of Lecturers’ Level of Readiness and Acceptance

Abstract

At the end of each semester, academic and administrative staff of a faculty have to analyse students’ results for a myriad of factors such as calculating performance of students and lecturers, and for the university’s senate confirmation. Unfortunately, many relevant personnel at the faculty level lack the clearance to access students’ results directly. To circumvent this issue, individual lecturers were required to print out and submit hardcopies of students’ results and channel the data to relevant personnel. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and lecturers were unable to submit the hardcopies, the faculty had to find an alternative. The introduction of the Marking and Reporting System (MaRS) marks a change from manual hardcopy submission of results following travel restrictions necessitated by the Malaysian government during the Covid-19 pandemic. As with any technological shift and innovation, the level of readiness and acceptance of academic and administrative staff at a faculty must be examined. This paper uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1986; Davis, Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1989) to determine the level of readiness and investigate the level of acceptance among academic and administrative staff in using MaRS via a questionnaire. The findings suggest that with adequate guidance and assistance, the respondents were positive towards using MaRS as the system offers advantages to them such as being cost effective, environmentally friendly, and more convenient in recording students' results. In short, the respondents are ready and willing to use MaRS to manage students’ results despite facing some difficulties in handling the system, because positively overcoming challenges will yield positive outcomes.