TISSUE wipes away exam time tears
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TISSUE wipes away exam time tears - a corn puterised system helps Swansea University improve examination timetabling Jonathan Thompson and Kathryn Dowsiand The task of examination timetabling at universities is becoming more difficult as student numbers rise and student choice widens. Many universities are turning to comput erised scheduling packages, and this article outlines various stages of the corn puterisation of the exami-
nation process at Swansea University. The practical issues involved in designing and implementing a system based on simulated annealing are addressed and the benefits and problems of the system are discussed. -oo0oo-
The current expansion in higher education puts
considerable pressure on resources and has repercussions on almost all aspects of academic life. One area where growing student numbers, more freedom of choice, and increasingly diverse courses has particular impact, is in the annual or biannual task
of scheduling examinations. Until recently, the majority of UK institutions have carried out this task by hand and initially our offer to build a computerised system for examination scheduling at Swansea
University was met with scepticism. However, we were able to overcome this sufficiently to be allowed to develop a system for the 1993 summer examina-
tions, with a view to extending this if successful.
Our remit was to produce a system that was capable
of producing a timetable subject to a variety of
constraints and which would eventually form part of a user-friendly system based on a 486 pc. Our response was TISSUE (The Integrated System for Scheduling University Exams) which has successfully produced the examination timetable for Swansea for the last two years. The purpose of this article is to outline the nature of this system and describe the
benefits and problems we have encountered in its implementation and subsequent use. Algorithm details can be found elsewhere (Thompson and Dowsiand 1994).
The problem at Swansea The examination scheduling problem at Swansea University is one of multiple objectives and many
Copyright @ 1995 Operational Research Society.
different constraints. It is a medium sized institution with approximately 8000 students which currently holds its examinations at the end of each academic year. Individual papers fall into one of two categories: those that count towards the final degree result of any of their candidates are classified as degree exams while the remainder are classified
as college exams. Thus degree exams include all papers taken by final year candidates, together with
a subset of second year papers. College exams include the majority of second year and all first year papers. The latter are relatively easy to timetable as they involve large groups of students taking identi-
cal courses with few if any options. Each department simply returns lists of papers which must not clash and these are used to produce an appropriate
schedule. Degree exams pose a more difficult problem as most schemes allow a great deal of choice in the fin
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