Looking for an overview of scheduling? Please take a look at our NEXT YEAR SCHEDULING OVERVIEW GUIDE. We also have webinars in our video library on the process. We also may have upcoming live webinars users can sign up for. View / Sign up for them via INFO>WEBINARS. |
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Parameters You Can Select When Running the Scheduler
- Interpreting the Results
- When You Are Ready to Lock in a Schedule
Overview
Click here to watch a video on using the Student Scheduler tool and '2-pass scheduler'
The Student Scheduler on the Next Year Scheduling>Mass Schedule>Student Scheduler screen will process student requests and create the best possible student schedules for the school. It runs in a sandbox type environment until a scheduler run is locked in.
You can run this as many times as you would like before locking in the schedule.
- Partial schedules show how many students did not satisfy all of their requests. It only takes one request not getting scheduled for a student to fall under the partial count
- Full schedules show how many students satisfied all of their requests. This technically does not mean a student has a full schedule by your standards; a full schedule to your school may equal a student have 8 total courses, the Student Scheduler in Genesis considers any student that had all requests made for them granted as part of the full count, even if it was only 1 course request
Before Getting Started
Did you check your students' requested credit totals? Be sure your students have a full load of courses requested. Students with only 1 course request that get scheduled become listed as "Fully Scheduled" in the scheduler run results.
You can easily check student credit totals on the Next Year Scheduling > Student Requests > Counselor screen, by searching for students with Less Than X Credits.
Parameters You Can Select When Running the Scheduler
Teams vs Grade Level options:
Select Teams To Run - and you can check off each team when running the scheduler. Students without teams will NOT be scheduled with this option.
Screen will look like this:
We added a new option to schedule students by teams instead of grade level. Only those on a team will be scheduled, students that are not assigned to a team will not be scheduled with this option.
When 'Select Teams to run' is clicked the scheduler runs on the bottom will be split up by team as opposed to grade, if you do a run by team you can still view partial/full schedules split by grade by clicking 'Select Grades to run'.
We also added two more report options, 'Partial Schedules (By team, name)', 'Complete Schedules (By team, name)' in order to help analyze runs done by team.
Select Grades to Run - you can check off each grade level you want to use when running the scheduler.
Screen will look like this:
Parameter | Description | |
Enforce Student Restrictions | Uncheck this option if you do not want the Scheduler to honor any Student Restrictions you have setup. (Restrictions are setup via Next Year Scheduling>Setup>Restrictions) | |
Enforce Course Semester Restrictions | Will use the course semester restrictions setup. Restricted courses will not be scheduled together into the same semester. Restrictions are setup via Next Year Scheduling>Setup>Restrictions) | |
Enforce Period Restrictions | Will use the print period restrictions setup. Restricted periods will not be scheduled together in the same schedule. Restrictions are setup via Next Year Scheduling>Setup>Restrictions) | |
Enforce Student/Teacher Restrictions | Will use the teacher student restrictions setup. Restricted teachers will not be scheduled with a student in the same schedule. Restrictions are setup via Next Year Scheduling>Setup>Restrictions) | |
Unlimited Seats Mode | You should use this option carefully because it will only create real student conflicts and will not conflict students because of seat count limitations. This option is useful as it will let you know whether there are better results when seat counts is not a factor. After running the scheduler with this option, are there still students who are not being scheduled into sections? If so, you will likely need more sections of that course, or you need to move what period they take place. | |
Force Gender Balancing | This option will attempt to balance class/sections by gender, however, it will not sacrifice a student schedule to maintain gender balance. | |
Force SpecEd Balancing | Spreads special ed students so they are balanced across all inclusion sections of a course. Requires course to be flagged with the Spec Ed Course checkbox. | |
Hide Inactive Courses from Scheduler | If checked, it will do as it says. If you happen to have any requests for an Inactive course however, the schedule run will throw an error message up on screen and not let you run it with the option selected. | |
Schedule Alternate Requests | Schedules students into their 'alternate' course request, after their 'primary' requests have all been scheduled. If student cannot be scheduled into their primary request, the scheduler will attempt to schedule their 'alternate' course assigned to that You can add alt requests via Student Data>Modify Student>Next Year Requests>Make Requests. If the course is unavailable, it will try to schedule the course section entered into the "Alt Course/Sec" column. However, the scheduler will NOT sacrifice a primary course request in order to schedule an alternate request. | |
Use Scheduled Courses as Requests | Used if students were given a next year schedule (hand-scheduled into at least one section) prior to running the student scheduler. This option will convert a student's next year scheduled course into a request which the scheduler will ALWAYS schedule student into. The request is not actually added to the student's Next Year Requests data. Make sure scheduled students no longer contain requests for courses they have been scheduled into. | |
Adjust Beginning Seat Counts for Already Scheduled Students | This option will be set automatically when Use Scheduled Courses as Requests is enabled. This option allows the scheduler to take note of the students who are already scheduled into a section at the time the scheduler is run. The scheduler analyzes 'beginning seat' totals on the classes, and subtracts by the number of students currently 'assigned' to the section for next year. It does not actually change the seat totals in your master class data, this number is adjusted in the background, only for use in the student scheduler. | |
Multi Course Section Linking | May be selected if you have setup Course Section Links where one course section is linked to more than one other course section. | |
Unique Code Identifying this run | This is automatically filled in with a code - but you may update the code here if necessary. | |
Use this Master | Defaults to the 'Regular Master.' This is the master that is created by copying the class master from the previous year or "burning" a master class builder class master. If you want to use a master class builder run, you will select one of the master class builder masters (which start with a numeric value) from the drop-down box. | |
Effort Per Student | If the scheduler is running for a long period of time; lower this value to make it run faster and not try as hard to get the perfect schedule. | |
Max # Electives per Student | Limits the TOTAL number of electives a student may be scheduled into. A course is considered an Elective if the 'Elective' checkbox is checked on the Curriculum Course | |
Debug log for Student ID | This was used for determining why a student cannot be scheduled (mainly for developer use for troubleshooting). Allows you to see the entire algorithm calculated for 1 student when the scheduler is run. | |
Scheduler’s Built in Priorities | ||
Seniority the higher grade levels are scheduled first (Seniors, then Juniors, etc.) | ||
Within the same Grade Level, Course Types Singletons first, then Doubletons, then Tripletons, etc. This tells the Next Year Scheduling process that these courses are top priority to a student's schedule as there are a limited number of sections available. (ie: Singleton means this course only has 1 section; Doubleton means this course only has 2 sections; etc.) | ||
Course Priority will create a tie breaker for hard conflict situations | ||
Hardest Student to Schedule is scheduled first. The amount of Singletons, and Doubletons, etc. add to the student’s scheduling difficulty | ||
Interpreting the Results
After running scheduler, look at overall results first, by clicking on the Run Code (ex: 013122-1) to see a listing of your courses. Each course will be listed with total Requests, Seats, and total students Scheduled.
Start by reviewing any courses that were highlighted in orange or yellow.
Orange courses indicate you have 2x as many seats as there are requests. This will let you know where you can free up rooms and/or teachers to where they are needed.
Yellow courses indicate there are not enough seats in the course. Total Requests is greater than Total Seats.
Once this has been addressed, the Student Scheduler can be run again, and should produce better results.
Partial schedules show how many students did not satisfy all of their requests. It only takes one request not getting scheduled for a student to fall under the partial count
Full schedules show how many students satisfied all of their requests. This technically does not mean a student has a full schedule by your standards; a full schedule to your school may equal a student have 8 total courses, the Student Scheduler in Genesis considers any student that had all requests made for them granted as part of the full count, even if it was only 1 course request
When You Are Ready to Lock in a Schedule
There is a 
icon to the left of every schedule run via: Next Year Scheduling>Mass Schedule>Student Scheduler.
When you click this button, a pop up will appear with 4 options:
You will be presented with the following 4 options:
- Delete all schedules and then use schedules from this run - This is the option that the majority of users will want to use. This option will wipe the sections of any students scheduled into them and then create student schedules for students based on the scheduling run selected
- Merge schedules from this run - This option will skip over students who have had their schedules manually done for them and then create student schedules for all those students who did not based on the scheduling run selected. Those who manually schedule some students prior to using the Student Scheduler and want to keep those schedule will want to use this option; ie: CST/Special Ed scheduling teams tend to do this
- Restore Master Class Schedule from this run - This option will return the Master Schedule (this is your sections) back to what they were at the time of the scheduling run that you have selected. This is useful to fix mistakes or to go back to Master Schedule runs with better percentages
- Delete all schedules FOR STUDENTS IN THIS RUN ONLY and then use schedules from this run - When loading schedules with this option, schedules for students who were not apart of the particular run will NOT be deleted. For example, if you ran the scheduler just for 9th grade students and loaded your schedules using this task, the schedules for 10th 11th and 12th graders would not be deleted.
Clicking the green "i" icon on a Schedule Run line will now display all the run options that a schedule run was run with (e.g. Unlimited Seats, Enforce Student Restrictions, etc.).
If you click the PDF icon to the left, you will get a pop up with various reports you can run with info on that specific scheduling run:
You might also see a yellow warning icon next to a scheduling run - this indicates there are invalid courses.
It means that students have requests for courses that no longer exist. If you click on the icon, you will see a list of those courses in question.
Example:
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