What's the difference between a Transaction Processing System and a
Management Information System? Of which system is a college
registration system an example ?

Hi there

TPS is an acronym describing Transaction Processing Systems. TPS
systems are exactly what the name implies - a system that processes
transactions that occur within an organization or business. TPS
systems tend to perform routine operations and serve as a foundation
for other systems. Transactions are business operations such as
customer orders, purchase orders, receipts, time cards, invoices,
payroll checks and, yes, college registrations.

A Transaction Processing System can consist of :-

- Data Collection eg getting registration papers.
- Data Editing eg making the paper ready for input to the system.
- Data Correction eg sorting out incorrect dates of birth, postal
codes etc.
- Data Manipulation eg assigning students to courses, car parking,
halls of residence etc .
- Data Storage eg where the data is physically located on disks/tapes
etc.
- Document Production eg hard copy of registration forms, ID cards
etc.

Here are some examples of TPS systems

- Sales/marketing systems for market research, pricing, promotion, new
product introduction.
- Manufacturing/production systems for scheduling, purchasing,
shipping/receiving, engineering, operations.
- Human resources systems for personnel records, benefits,
compensation, labor relations, training.
- Industry specialized systems such as university registration,
freight shipping and rates, property management and renting etc.

So you can see that a TPS covers a wide variety of both manual and
automated tasks, in support of an overall process or business.

MIS is an acronym for Management Information System, which is a system
that provides periodic and predetermined reports that summarize
information.
It is usually attached, and part of, a bigger Transaction Processing
system, and exists to give Management reports of activity eg an MIS
attached to a larger Student Registration system might give reports on
numbers of students registering, amounts of course fees defaulted etc
etc, -- information that the college would require to make management
decisions.

So MIS supports the management level by providing routine summary
reports and exception reports (e.g.  Which students were here in the
Fall who did not choose to return in the Spring?) and MIS differs from
TPS in that MIS deals with summarized and compressed data from the
TPS.

(You might come across the term DSS. This stands for Decision Support
Systems Typically, they provide the ability to do "what if" analysis. 
DSS uses the data from MIS, but is more a "right now" analysis than
the long-term structured analysis of MIS.)

And to answer your last question, you can see from the above that a
college registration system is an example of a TPS.

Hope that helps

Willie-ga 


A nice rundown of the different kinds of informaton systyms
Introduction to Information Systems
http://www.ii.metu.edu.tr/~ion501/demo/21.html

A Computer concepts Glossary
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072464011/student_view0/chapter12/glossary.html

Google search terms used 
MIS TPS introduction