Reviewing Class Schedules with Scheduler

Overview

After building your class schedules, you’ll need to review their quality and decide whether to make changes or continue on to enrolling students. You can determine the quality of the schedule produced by seeing how many classes were scheduled, reviewing unscheduled classes, checking the overall course distribution and finally looking at the master schedule.

Scheduled Classes

You can begin to get a sense for how well the Scheduler was able to schedule your classes simply by reviewing the Scenarios page and looking at the “Classes Scheduled” percentage for your result. The higher this number, the better the quality of your schedule presumably.

A lower percentage does not necessarily mean the Scheduler did a poor job creating class schedules, as there can be a number of reasons why a class was not scheduled. Reviewing the unscheduled classes list will help you determine that.

Unscheduled Classes

The next quality check to review is why classes were left unscheduled. This is best seen on the Classes page under the Configuration tab. From here, you can filter your classes to just look at the ones that were left unscheduled.

There are two reasons a class might be unscheduled: either because the scheduler could not find a place to schedule the class, or because the scheduler did not have enough information to schedule the class. The first reason could reflect quality issues with the result the Scheduler produced. The second reason is a result of incomplete constraint configurations.

The “Unscheduled” filter will show all classes that were unscheduled regardless of the reason. Classes that were not possible to schedule because of missing information are indicated with a red ‘x’ next to them. All other classes in the list are ones that the Scheduler could have scheduled but did not. These classes may need to be scheduled by hand, or constraints may need to be modified so the Scheduler has more options when scheduling them. The fewer number of these unscheduled classes, the better the quality of your result.

The “Cannot Be Scheduled” filter will only show the classes that the Scheduler could not schedule with the information provided. Clicking in to these classes will reveal an explanation as to why the class could not be scheduled. This filter does not reflect how well the Scheduler did building a schedule because these classes were not eligible to be scheduled.

To schedule these classes, click in to the class to determine why this class was unschedule-able and edit the appropriate constraints so the class can be scheduled in a future result.

Course Distribution

Another quality check to review is the distribution of each course’s sections. This can be seen from the Course Distribution report under the Reports tab. This report shows you how spread out all of the sections of a course could have been and compares how well the Scheduler did in achieving that. The more spread out the class sections are (i.e. the smaller the difference number), the better the quality of your result. Learn more about the Course Distribution Report.

Reviewing the Schedule

If the quality of your result seems good, you can review the master schedule to see how well the Scheduler did creating individual teacher schedules. Clicking on the Results tab will take you to the Schedule Overview page where you can see the master schedule for your Active Result (or toggle to a different result). From here, you can review your schedule and see what the daily schedule looks like by teacher, or by room.

Locking Class Schedules

As you review class schedules, you may decide you want to keep some of the schedules in this result and use them for future results as well. You can do this by locking the class schedule to the Template Result of your Scenario (learn more about Scenarios and Template Results). Locking is an optional feature and does not need to be done to store or save your final class schedule.

To lock any individual class schedules, go to the “Class Schedule” tab on the Class page. From here, click on the “Use This Schedule for Future Results” button to lock this schedule for the class. Locked records only apply to the Scenario the Result is in; it does not lock the schedule record across Scenarios.

If you want to instead lock ALL existing class schedules, you can do this from the Result page. Start by clicking on the name of the Result whose schedule you wish to lock from the Scenarios page. When the Result page opens, click the button under the Class Schedules section that says “Use Schedules for Future Results”. This will lock all class schedules so they will be used in any subsequent Result in this Scenario.