Examinations
Building an exam timetable
Examination scheduling is not teaching scheduling with different labels. The unit of analysis changes from the group to the individual student, and everything follows from that.
The exam day itself is a separate piece
This article is about building the examination timetable. Staffing the room, seating candidates and the ratios that govern both are covered separately in exam invigilation and seating.
The unit of analysis changes
In a teaching timetable, students move as cohorts and checking at group level is adequate. In an examination timetable, every student's combination of modules is potentially unique — particularly with electives, joint honours, resits and students repeating a year.
This means two papers that no student group shares may still collide for a small number of individuals. If your clash check operates at group level, those students discover the problem on the morning of the exam. Nothing else in academic administration fails quite so publicly.
Rules that have to hold
- No individual student has two papers at once. Checked across every module combination, not every group.
- Minimum gap between a student's consecutive papers, usually expressed in hours or sessions and frequently a regulation rather than a preference.
- Room capacity under examination conditions, computed on seating separation rather than lecture headcount — often less than half.
- Invigilator ratios, with invigilators available and not themselves examining elsewhere.
- Access arrangements, where students with adjustments need extra time, separate rooms or specific equipment.
- Paper security windows, where papers sat at different times must not overlap in ways that allow disclosure.
Seating plans are part of the schedule
A seating plan determines actual room capacity, which feeds back into which papers can be scheduled together. Producing the schedule first and the seating plan afterwards means discovering capacity problems too late to move anything.
Handled properly, the seating rule and each room's layout are part of the scheduling itself, so a sitting is only ever given the candidates its halls can seat. In Wise Timetable the scheduler seats every candidate as it places the exam, and every invigilator receives a duty list — the exam, the number of candidates, the hall, the date and the hour — as a file attached to an email.
Publishing to students
Every student needs their own examination timetable, not the faculty's. Wise Timetable sends each student their own by email — every paper with its hall, seat row and column, date and starting hour, as a file attached to the message. A hall changed after generating is rewritten in every file that mentions it, so a corrected plan can go out the same day, which removes the entire class of problems caused by students working from a screenshot of an early draft.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.