Who has not finished
Every student who has not completed their choice, and what is missing — and one reminder letter to all of them, each in the language they read the page in.
Student affairs
Elective selection, inside the timetable
Students choose their electives knowing when each one is taught and whether it clashes with their own week. The student office runs the round from the browser administration, and the result goes back into the timetable as groups with their students — groups the generator keeps apart once they are on their lessons.
- Ranked wishes or first come, first served
- Clashes with the student’s own week shown
- Choices handed to the timetable as groups
One round, from the offer to the timetable
Open a round
Name it, say when it opens and closes, and choose how seats are given: wishes ranked by the students and allocated at the end, or first come, first served. The offer for each programme and year opens already filled with the subjects your timetable marks as electives — take out what is not running, add what is.
Set the rules
How many electives each student chooses, or how many credits; option sets with limits of their own; and for every elective the minimum it needs to run, its seats and a description the students read.
Students choose
On their phone, signed in once. Each elective shows when it is taught and names anything it clashes with in the student’s own timetable — its lecturers where your institution shows lecturers, and the seats left where you choose to show them. One that is not in this year’s timetable yet says when it was taught last year.
Allocate
In a ranked round, Allocate gives as many seats as wishes and seats allow, then brings as many students as possible up to their minimum, then gives the highest wishes. A lottery settles what is still equal, and its seed is kept, so the result can be reproduced — and explained to the student who asks. The office sees the result before it is final.
Hand it to the timetable
Each running elective becomes a group in its own programme, with its students as members — written so that a publish from a desktop at version 15.4.90 or later keeps them. The planner puts each group on its elective’s lessons; with the generator’s check for student groups ticked, two electives that share students are then never placed at the same time.
What the student office has to hand
Cancelled, and round two
An elective below its minimum can be cancelled. The students who had it are told by letter, in their own language, and a second round offers only what still has seats.
Moving a student
Put a student on an elective, take them off, change a rank. Over the seats is a warning, never a refusal, and every change is in the log with who made it.
Back to the student records
Every choice as a CSV for the student information system: number, name, subject, rank and what the student got.
Students from a file
Students, their groups and, optionally, their subjects, read from a CSV export of your student records with the columns recognised by name. A student missing from the file is listed, never deleted.
The institution’s settings
Ranked or first come by default, whether seats left are shown, electives from other programmes, how long changes are allowed after closing, and how students sign in.
And the Option Selector?
Option Selector, built for a department of the University of Oxford, is a separate application and is described on its own page. Elective selection is the same job done inside Wise Timetable, on the timetable’s own data — which is what lets it show a student when an elective is taught, name a clash with their own week, and hand the result straight back as groups.
The guides
Three guides, the same PDFs the application opens behind its own ?: the guide for students (6 pages), the guide for the student office (12 pages) — rounds, offers, allocation, round two, the letters, the hand-off and students from a file — and the guide for administrators (5 pages): switching it on, the settings and how students sign in. All three are on the documentation page as well.
What it does not do yet
Putting an elective’s new group on the elective’s lessons stays the planner’s step: the screen lists every elective whose group is not on a lesson yet, rather than editing the timetable on its own. And the student import reads a CSV with its columns recognised by name; layouts made for particular student information systems will follow once we have their sample files.
Related capabilities
See Wise Timetable on your own data
Book a 45-minute online presentation. We will walk through your institution's scheduling problem, show how Wise Timetable handles it, and answer anything your team wants to test.