Illuminate's Student Scheduler is designed around satisfying student course requests. This chapter focuses on using the Mass Student Scheduler and running reports to assist in solving scheduling problems.
Student Scheduling Considerations
Before running the scheduler, give some consideration to doing some hand scheduling of unique populations before running the mass scheduler. It can be a time-saving trick to place some students in some sections in advance to ensure that specific students are scheduled efficiently.
Any time that you schedule a student into a section by hand, their roster is LOCKED and will not be changed by the mass student scheduler. Only another human click will change their placement. Use this to your advantage by scheduling the high importance classes by hand, and allowing the mass student scheduling tool to work around you.
Troubleshooting Your Schedule
Run Schedule Checker
Schedule Checker can show why the scheduler might be failing
Course Request Details
Load Course Request Details and run for "Request is Fulfilled" > No.
- Click on the Course Name to sort by course.
- If you see the same course name only a few times, it tells you that MOST students got their course request filled. The courses that only have a few unfulfilled requests should probably be fixed by hand.
- If you see a large number of unfulfilled course requests for the same course, there may be a systematic problem. Here are some common scheduling problems:
- The wrong course number was used -Make sure the course request course number matches the course numbers placed on the master schedule board. If you have accidentally used the wrong course number, you can mass-change the course requests from the Course Tally screen, or mass change the courses tied to the section numbers on the Draft Sections page
- The course is full. Do you have enough sections on the board, and does each section have the correct number of seats? Go to the Draft Board and filter for the course in question. Check the number of sections and the class sizes. You can solve this problem by creating new or editing existing Draft Sections, or changing some course requests on the Course Tally.
- The sections are empty, and yet no students were enrolled. If the course numbers match and students didn't get loaded into the course, check Houses, Linked Sections, and Teacher-Course Links. There is a good chance that some other factor is keeping students from being rostered to the empty section.
- If you're seeing a large number of unfulfilled course request for a single course, and the systematic suggestions listed above down pan out, it may be two additional problems. To discover the problem, it helps to take a sample of students and look at their draft schedule.
- Open up 8-10 individual students draft schedules to look for patterns. Use Command+Click (CNTRL + Click on a PC) to open each students draft schedule in a new tab. Dont try to solve the problem, just look at the sample set to identify trends.
- They all have a schedule hole in the same Timeblock. If you're seeing a common pattern of open periods for students, and they all have an unfulfilled request for Course A, maybe you need a course A in that timeblock? Go back to the board and see if you can set up the schedule in a way to solve the problem.
- None of the students have a hole in their schedule. If a bunch of students have an unfulfilled course request, but no open timeblocks in their schedule, the issue may be with course requests or the way terms were set up on the board
- Students may have too many course requests. Use Student Course Requests Counts to count to identify students with too many requests.
Linked Sections
If you find students are not being placed into Linked Sections, review student course requests to ensure that students have requests for all courses tied to the Linked Sections.
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