RESEARCH ASSISTANT REPORTS SYSTEM

Abstract

Universities often rely on ad-hoc e-mail and spreadsheet workflows to track research-assistant (RA) progress, leading to missed deadlines, opaque approval chains, and inconsistent archival records. To address these challenges at Nazarbayev University, we designed and implemented RA Reports, a three-tier web application that delivers secure, role-based reporting for RAs and project administrators (PAs). The system couples a React front-end with a Spring Boot back-end and a PostgreSQL relational store; modular services handle authentication (Spring Security + JWT), contract-linked report submission, multi-stage approvals, revision tracking, and real-time status notifications. Over two academic semesters an agile team of five students iteratively refined the architecture, achieving 95 % unit-test coverage on authentication modules and 99 % API reliability in Postman benchmarks. Functional testing verified every critical user path, while field trials with 14 RAs and 8 PAs showed high usability: 92.9 % of RAs and 100 % of PAs rated their dashboards “4” or “5” for clarity, and 75 % of PAs preferred the platform to legacy e-mail workflows. These results confirm that RA Reports streamlines compliance, increases transparency, and lays a scalable foundation for future integrations such as multilingual interfaces, e-mail alerts, and finance-system links. The project demonstrates how lightweight, component-oriented design can modernize administrative processes in higher-education research environments