Modeling Course Requests

Date Active in Course

Select the add date to use for modeling the student's schedule.

Override Seat Counts

Checked if the Student Scheduler should override the maximum seats for a course-section. If this box is checked when you run the Student Scheduler, the system will schedule students into course-sections that are full.

If you do not have security to override seat counts, you cannot select the box.

Override House/Teams

Checked if the Student Scheduler should schedule students into courses without considering house/teams. Check this box if you do not want to restrict courses based on house/teams.

If you do not have security to override house/teams, you cannot select the box.

Ignore Course Priorities

Course priorities that the scheduler should ignore when scheduling students. Any course with a course priority matching those listed is not scheduled.

You can enter a comma-delimited list or a range of values separated by a hyphen. For example, if you are scheduling major courses with priorities in the 100-60 range, you can prevent scheduling courses with lower priorities by entering either 10,20,30,40,50 or 10-50.

Student Alternates

Checked if the Student Scheduler should schedule student alternate requests if the student cannot be scheduled into any regular request.

Student Course Alternates

Checked if the Student Scheduler should schedule student course alternate requests if the student cannot be scheduled into the corresponding regular request.

Preserve Schedule

Checked if you want to preserve the student's schedule. Unchecked if you do not want to preserve any courses that are already scheduled for the student.

Balance Criteria

Select how course-sections should be balanced. If you select to balance course-sections, the scheduler attempts to balance the students scheduled into course-sections using the selected criteria. For example, balancing by behavior codes minimizes the chance of scheduling several students with one or more of the incident codes listed in the Scheduling Building Configuration into the same course-section.

Select:

C - Classification - to balance course-sections based on the scheduling weight of student classification codes specified in Registration's Classifications validation table.
D - Discipline - to balance course-sections based on students with certain types of incidents. The incident codes used for balancing schedules are specified in the Scheduling Building Configuration.
S - Gender - to balance course-sections based on the gender of students.
G - Grade - to balance course-sections based on the grade of students.
X - None - to not balance course-sections.
E - Race - to balance course-sections based on the race of students.

Maximum Tries

A factor representing the number of tries that the Student Scheduler should attempt when scheduling a student. Enter a number from 1 - 100. Each factor represents 10,000 tries. For example, if you enter 2, the system makes 20,000 attempts.

A try is a successful or unsuccessful attempt to schedule a student into a single course-section. When the student has been successfully scheduled, the tries stop for that student, regardless of the maximum tries per student allowed. For example, if a student is successfully scheduled after only 200 tries, the Student Scheduler stops trying to schedule that student into the course-section. If a student cannot be scheduled by the maximum tries allotted, the student is timed out.

We recommend that you start with a factor of no more than 5. You may increase this in a later run if you think it is productive to use more tries.

Student Timeout in Seconds

If you want the Student Scheduler to time out for a student after a specified number of seconds, enter the number of seconds. For example, enter 30 to time out after 30 seconds. We recommend using no more than 60 seconds for the student timeout.

Leave this field blank if you do not want to specify a timeout.

Use Balancing

Checked if the scheduler should balance the total course weight for marking periods. Based on the Course Catalog Semester Weight value for courses, the scheduler will attempt to balance the course weights for the marking period.

For example, if you assign high values to major courses and low values to minor courses, the scheduler attempts to balance courses academically so the student is not scheduled into all major courses in one marking period and minor courses in another marking period.

If you leave this box unchecked, the algorithm still tries to balance the number of courses in each semester, but does not distinguish between major and minor courses.

Maximum Imbalance

The largest imbalance between marking periods allowed if you are using marking period balancing. The Student Scheduler uses this value to determine whether a student's schedule is within the acceptable imbalance for this run.

If you want to balance the schedule, a weight must be assigned to courses in the Course Catalog. For example, you may assign a weight of 100 to major courses and 50 to minor (elective) courses.

To check for an imbalance, the Student Scheduler compares the weight of the marking periods with the highest and lowest weight. The weight of a marking period is the sum of the weight of all courses for the marking period. The weight for a course that meets multiple marking periods is added to every marking period that the course meets. For example, if a student is scheduled for 7 major courses (weight of 100) and 1 minor course (weight of 50), the weight of the marking period would be 750.

You might use a maximum imbalance of 50 if you let students take one more major class in a marking period, than in another. In this case, a student's schedule would not be balanced if marking period 1 had 4 major courses and 4 minor courses with a combined weight of 600 and marking period 3 had 6 major courses and 2 minor courses with a combined weight of 700.

Same Period For Same Teacher

Checked if the Student Scheduler should schedule blockettes in the same period if the Master Schedule record for the block has the Same Teacher field set to R - Linking Required.

If your building has no blocks defined to link blockettes to the same teacher, leave this field unchecked.

You might use this option if there is a block with blockette courses that meet for one marking period each and you want to schedule the blockettes in the same period so the student has the same teacher for the period in all marking periods.

Sort By

Use the fields in this section to set up the order in which the Student Scheduler sorts courses.

Select:

B - Blocks
F - Fewest Sections
H - House
M - Multiple Sessions
P - Priority

Then By

Use these fields to set up each subsequent level for sorting courses.

Select:

B - Blocks
F - Fewest Sections
H - House
M - Multiple Sessions
P - Priority