An undergraduate uses OR to improve Final Exam Schedules at her university

Abstract

Final examination scheduling is typically a complex problem that impacts students, faculty, and administrators at every university.  In this paper, we describe how an undergraduate student, for her senior project at Kutztown University, analysed the final exam schedules at Kutztown University to see if she could improve them.  Specifically, she wanted to see if she could reduce student conflicts defined to be a student having three exams scheduled on the same day.  The approach that she developed, based on a balanced bin packing algorithm, was very appealing because it could be implemented manually by a staff member of the Registrar’s office, requiring at most 30 minutes to generate the schedule.  Testing this approach using actual data from the Fall 2015 semester resulted in a 42% reduction in student conflicts.  This approach, because of its simplicity and intuitive appeal, was widely accepted by the Kutztown University faculty and administrators and is being implemented for the Fall 2016 semester.