Schedule Students Page

Building

Building you are scheduling.

Date Active in Courses

The first day that students are attending the courses. The date is used as the Date Added value for courses that are scheduled.

Make sure to enter the correct date; otherwise, attendance information may be incorrect. The system uses the date added to determine the first day a student should be attending the course.

Override Seat Counts

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

The scheduler overrides seat counts only if the user has security rights to override seat counts.

Override House/Team

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

The scheduler overrides house/teams only if the user has security rights to override house/teams.

If the building is set up for Multiple Bell Scheduling, do not check this box.

Course Priorities to Ignore

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.

Schedule Course Alternates

Checked if the scheduler should schedule the course alternate for a course as defined in the Course Catalog if the student cannot be scheduled into the regular request.

Student Alternates

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

Student Course Alternates

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

Scheduling Interval

The scheduling interval that you are scheduling. The scheduling interval determines the requests and courses that will be scheduled.

If the building has multiple intervals, you must select an interval for which students are not already scheduled. Otherwise, student schedules may be lost.

Preserve Student Schedules

Checked if you want the scheduler to preserve existing schedules for students.

Balance Courses

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 discipline codes minimizes the chance of scheduling several students with one or more of the specified offense codes into the same course-section.

Select:

E - Race - to balance course-sections based on the ethnicity of students.
S - Gender - to balance course-sections based on the gender of students.
G - Grade - to balance course-sections based on the grade of students.
C - Classification - to balance course-sections based on the scheduling weight of student classification codes specified in Registration's Classifications validation table. If multiple classifications are allowed, only the first classification row is considered when balancing course-sections.
D - Discipline - to balance course-sections based on students with certain types of incidents. The incident codes for balancing schedules are defined in your building's Scheduling Configuration.
X - None - to not balance course-sections.

Maximum Tries

The maximum tries that the scheduler should attempt when scheduling a student. Enter a number from 1-100 to indicate how many times the scheduler should try to schedule a student. 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 20 tries, the algorithm stops trying to schedule the student into the course-section. If a student cannot be scheduled by the maximum tries allotted, the student is timed out.

Student Timeout in Seconds

If you want the 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 Marking Period 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 Marking Period Imbalance

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

Shuffle Attempts

The number of attempts the scheduler can try to shuffle another student to create an open seat in the course section so the current student can be scheduled. If you do not want to shuffle students, enter 0 (zero).

The shuffling process moves students who are partially scheduled in an attempt to schedule another student; it does not touch students who have been fully scheduled.

Caution

Using Shuffle Attempts can dramatically increase the amount of time that the algorithm spends processing each student. You should start with a small number of Shuffle Attempts and increase the number of attempts as needed. There are many factors that can affect the processing time for shuffling schedules so we recommend that you use 5 or fewer attempts.

Reschedule Attempts

The number of attempts the scheduler can try to completely reschedule another student to fit the current student into a closed course-section. If you do not want to reschedule students, enter 0 (zero).

The rescheduling process only moves students who are fully scheduled. The scheduler only reschedules a student if the student still ends up with a full schedule. If needed, it may replace a regular request with an alternate.

Caution

Using Reschedule Attempts can dramatically increase the amount of time that the algorithm processes each student. You should start with a small number of Reschedule Attempts and increase the number of attempts as needed. There are many factors that can affect the processing time for reschedule attempts, so we recommend that you enter 5 or fewer attempts.

Same Period for Same Teacher

Checked if the scheduler should schedule blockettes in the same period if the block's Master Schedule record 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 you have a block with blockette courses that meet for one marking period each and students should be scheduled with the same teacher in the same period for both marking periods.

Request Sort Order Section

Select the Request Sort Order options for setting the order for scheduling a student's requests. For example, you can choose to schedule in order by course priority.

Select one of the following for each sort level you want to use:

B - Blocks - to schedule block courses first.
P - Priority - to schedule courses in order by course priority.
H - House - to schedule students into courses designated for their house/teams before attempting to schedule courses that do not have the corresponding teams.
F - Fewest Sections - to schedule courses in order by the number of sections of each course. For example, this option is likely to schedule students with requests for singletons (courses in the Course Catalog with a single section) first.
M - Multiple Sessions - to schedule courses based on the number of multiple sessions for courses.