Consulting and technology outfit Infosys have today announced they helped UCAS deliver academic results and university places to 400,000 British students back in August.
For those unfamiliar with the British higher education system, UCAS is the platform solely responsible for notifying students whether they achieved a place at their University of choice. On results day- which was the 14th August this year- most students will have spent their mornings anxiously refreshing the UCAS homepage, waiting to hear if their dreams of higher education were to become a reality.
As you can imagine, UCAS required a robust back-end system to deal with the level of demand. To put it in perspective, the platform had to upload and deliver a staggering 5 million sets of results, and handle 239 logins a second at peak demand. Many students from abroad also apply through the UCAS system, meaning the platform had to handle requests from across the globe on a multitude of devices.
Elaborating on the technological demands, Rajesh K. Murthy of Infosys stated ““With hundreds of thousands of students receiving their results on the same day, there is a massive spike in demand on the UCAS Track service around the world. Each applicant needs to be able to log in quickly on results day to see their status, and be able to use the Clearing process if they are still looking for a place. UCAS and Infosys have worked closely to ensure the systems are ready for students to take the next important step in their life.”
UCAS’ Director of IT, James Munson, added that although most of the UCAS results and “clearing” (placing students who didn’t achieve the required grades into institutions they didn’t originally apply for) happened on the day, the system was designed and implemented months in advance. “Months of advanced planning with the Infosys team have enabled us to deliver our A-level results day Confirmation and Clearing service, meaning hundreds of thousands of students were able to log in that morning to see if they had secured their place at university or college.”
Such a high-profile use case is certainly a coup for Infosys, proving their mettle in managing mission-critical systems on a high-intensity workload.
(Image credit: Central Sussex College)
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