Examinations
Exam scheduling software
Examination timetabling is a different problem from teaching timetabling, and treating it as a special case of the same thing is why so many institutions end up doing it in a spreadsheet. Wise Timetable has a dedicated exam scheduler: it generates the session, seats every student and sends each person their own schedule.
- Generated automatically
- Seat-by-seat plans
- Included in the licence
Why examinations are harder than teaching
In a teaching timetable you schedule groups. In an examination timetable you must consider individual students, because every student's combination of modules is potentially unique.
That changes the nature of the clash check entirely. Two papers that no student group shares may still collide for the eleven students taking an unusual elective combination — and those eleven students will find out on the morning of the exam if your system only checks at group level.
Examinations also carry rules that teaching does not: how many papers a student may sit in a day and on consecutive days, room capacity computed on seating separation rather than headcount, and who supervises each room.
What the module handles
One exam timetabling tool in the desktop application, from the exam halls and the registrations to the last email.
- Generates the examination timetable automatically from the list of exams, the session's dates and starting hours, and the exam halls
- Checks clashes student by student, from each student's own course registrations rather than from groups
- Seats every candidate at a row and a column in a named hall, never beside another student sitting the same paper
- Seats a large exam across as many halls as it needs at one sitting, and tells every candidate the hall they actually sit in
- Limits how many exams one student sits in a day, how many principal subjects in a day, and on how many days in a row
- Never gives a course's exam supervisor two exams in different halls at one sitting
- Invigilators picked from the lecturer list per hall and sitting, a chief invigilator for each hall, and the number of candidates per invigilator in view
- Moves an exam to another hall after generating, without regenerating the rest
- Emails every student their own exam card and every invigilator their own duty list, each as a file attached to the message
From exam halls to every inbox
The order a timetable office works in. The first three steps are set up once and then kept current; the session itself takes an afternoon the first time and about an hour after that.
Mark the exam halls
Tick a room as an exam hall and give it a seat grid — columns and rows of desks, measured for an exam rather than for a lecture.
Bring in the registrations
Who sits which exam comes from course registrations: entered by hand, imported from a CSV file, or taken from the student information system. Groups are not used.
Mark supervisors and principal subjects
Each course names its exam supervisor, and the subjects a programme is built around are marked as major, so a stricter daily limit can apply to them.
Choose the courses and the dates
Choose the courses that sit an exam this session, then add up to twelve dates with up to five starting hours each, and set the three student limits.
Generate and read the result
The scheduler reports how many exams it placed, over how many days and halls, and which it could not place and how many student registrations they affect.
Staff the halls and send
Pick invigilators from the lecturer list per hall and sitting, send yourself a test, then send every student and every invigilator their own schedule.
Seating plans that hold on the morning of the exam
Every candidate gets a hall, a row and a column, and the plan is made with the schedule rather than in a spreadsheet the week before.
Two students sitting the same paper are never seated next to each other, unless neighbour checking is switched off for a session where seating is not an anti-copying measure. With diagonal seating allowed — the recommended setting — one exam can use half the desks in a hall; without it, a quarter. Students sitting different papers may sit side by side, so several exams can share one hall.
That gives the one rule worth knowing before a session: the largest ordinary exam you can place is half of your largest hall. A course marked as a large exam in its Final Exam Settings is the exception: it is seated across as many halls as it needs at one sitting, the halls with the most free seats first, its candidates side by side — or kept apart by the neighbour rule as well, if you tick that too. It stays one exam with one supervisor, every candidate is still checked for clashes and is told the hall they actually sit in, and it is placed only when every one of them has a seat, never half. The seat grid is measured for the exam, independently of the room's teaching capacity, because the same room holds a different number of candidates in rows of desks than it does at a lecture.
Each student's card carries the course, the hall, the seat row and column, the date and the starting hour — everything needed to walk into the right room and sit in the right chair.
Invigilators, per hall and per sitting
Each exam carries its course's exam supervisor — the lecturer responsible for the paper — and the scheduler never gives that person two exams in different halls at the same sitting. A large exam spread over several halls keeps its one supervisor, who walks between them. The rest of the team, the invigilators (proctors, in North America), is added by hand per hall and per sitting, because the people change between sittings. They are picked from the lecturer list, which holds every professor and also any administrators entered in it, so invigilation is not limited to the people who teach. One of them can be marked chief invigilator — the one who holds the papers and signs the attendance sheet.
For every hall the scheduler shows how many candidates are sitting there and how many each invigilator is watching. It does not enforce a ratio, because every institution has its own, but an understaffed hall is visible weeks before the session rather than on the morning. Every invigilator receives their own duty list: the exam, the number of candidates, the hall, the date and the hour.
Ratios, seating and who does what on the day are covered in exam invigilation and seating.
Exam scheduling questions
Does it generate the exam timetable automatically?
Yes. You give it the exams, the session's dates and starting hours, and the exam halls; it places the exams in sittings and halls and seats the candidates. When it finishes it reports what it placed and what it could not, and the manual lists the usual reasons an exam stays unplaced together with the change that fixes each.
How does it prevent exam clashes?
At the level of the individual student. A sitting is refused for an exam if any one of its students is already sitting another exam then, has reached the day's limit, or would break the rule on consecutive days. Groups play no part, so a clash that affects only a few students with an unusual combination is found like any other.
How large a session can it plan?
Up to twelve dates with five starting hours each — sixty sittings — thirty-two exam halls, 1,024 exams, 768 students on one exam and 16,384 students in one session. Reaching a limit is written to the application log, naming the limit, so a session that lost the end of a list can be found afterwards.
Can a resit session be planned separately?
Yes. Each session is its own project over the same database, with its own list of the courses that sit an exam, so a resit session is planned as a project of its own.
Does it use the same data as the teaching timetable?
It reads the same rooms, courses, lecturers and students, so nothing is typed twice. It is a separate scheduler, though: it does not place lessons or read the weekly timetable, and it works from course registrations rather than groups. The finished plan can go back to the student information system as a seat-level export.
Is exam scheduling an extra cost?
No. The module is included in every licence. Almost everywhere else in this market, exam scheduling is a separately priced extension.
Download the manual
- Planning an examination session (PDF, 21 pages)The whole of an exam session for the people who run one: building the session, allocating candidates to rooms and invigilators to sittings, the constraints an examination period carries that a teaching week does not, and getting the finished schedule out to students. Free, and no form to fill in.
- Per-student generation (PDF, 9 pages)The other half of student-level scheduling: building groups and parallel sections from enrolment data rather than by hand, so that the clash check has real individual students to check against. In production at a faculty of around 2,500 students.
- Wise Timetable User Manual (PDF, 278 pages)The complete desktop manual, examinations included, with every screen illustrated. 19 MB, so it is a download rather than something to read in a browser tab.
- All published manualsOver thirty documents and the ISO/IEC 27001 certificate, published openly and none of them behind a form.
Related capabilities
- Room bookingRooms booked by the people who need them, with booking rights and approval.
- Wise Exam PlannerA separate web application for building the examination calendar; Wise Timetable users generally do not need it.
- Mobile appsThe weekly timetable on each student's phone, with a push notification when it changes.
- Building an exam timetableGaps, clashes and accommodation rules.
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.