Vince Pellegrini, assistant registrar, academic scheduling (center, hand up), discusses Bucknell final exam scheduling during a meeting about optimizing scheduling with the group working on the project, including Samuel Gutekunst (far right), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Data Science.
Emily Paine/Bucknell University
The final week of the academic term is often stressful for students as they submit their last assignments and prepare for exams. While finals themselves can be taxing, the schedule of exams can further exhaust students’ academic and emotional capacities.
A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found 31 percent of respondents believe a reimagined schedule that spaces out exams or finals would most increase their academic success. This was the third most popular option out of a list of 15 choices.
Constructing an efficient final exam schedule requires intensive calculation and consideration by the registrar’s office, and one that sometimes leaves students with complicated hours of when they’re taking exams.
So a group of faculty and students at Bucknell University created a tool to assist staff as they create the exam schedule each term, weighing factors that are important to students, faculty and the institution that hopefully results in the fewest inconveniences.
Setting the stage: The examination timetabling problem is not a new challenge in higher education, and one that is dependent on a multitude of factors at each institution.
At Bucknell, staff create the finals schedule before the add-drop period concludes, so there’s no way to outline which students have conflicts in their schedules before the term starts.
The university also often combines large courses across sections to provide one exam hour—for example, all sections of Calculus 1 take the final exam simultaneously—which deviates from a traditional method of using the class meeting time to establish the schedule and can complicate scheduling.
Samuel Gutekunst, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Data Science, has been waiting for years to address Bucknell’s finals schedule problem and got the green light in 2023 to start building tools for the registrar’s office to address challenges.
Put into practice: The project—a cross-college collaboration between Gutekunst; assistant professor of mathematics Lucas Waddell; Thiago Serral, a former professor of analytics and operations management who now teaches at the University of Iowa; and a group of student researchers, Clara Chaplin, Tsugunobu Miyake and Stanley Gai—started that spring.
Over the next few months, the students created a Tableau dashboard, pulling historical enrollment data to create a heat map of sorts identifying trends in enrollment to identify which classes may have mutual enrollees. The tool proved useful in supporting the registrar’s office, creating an easier way to visualize enrollment trends.
From there, the students built a web tool to create a portfolio of schedules that spaced out exams to minimize challenges for students. The site is internally called “the exam scheduling tool” but will likely be called BEAST (Bucknell Exam Automated Scheduling Tool) in a future publication, Gutekunst says.
A spring 2023 student survey at Bucknell helped researchers identify what factors were most important in a finals schedule, and these trends, when set against university policies and protocols, helped flesh out the system. The project team identified four “inconveniences” that should be avoided in a student’s exam schedule, which include:
- Overlapping exams
- Three exams in 24 hours
- Back-to-back exams
- An evening exam followed by an early-morning exam
- Four exams in 48 hours
Now, a staff member just has to log onto the website, click “run” and let the tool build four different timetables. Staff can also make changes directly to the schedule using drag and drop, which generates a new report of how many students are inconvenienced, allowing for real-time comparison of arrangements.
The impact: After introducing the new website into the finals schedule creation process, the number of students who have complicated schedules has declined.
In spring 2023, the finals schedule inconvenienced 1,182 students. But a year later, 432 students had an inconvenience in their schedule as generated by the tool.
“We went from about 30 percent of Bucknell students having at least one major inconvenience in their exam schedule down to about 11 percent,” said Gutekunst. “Removing as many of these as possible will make for a much less stressful exam week that’s more conducive to student success.”
A majority of these students have back-to-back exams and “we feel sad for them, but they’re more spaced out now,” Gutekunst says.
One area that saw significant improvement was the number of students who had more than three exams scheduled within a 24-hour time period. In spring 2023, 243 students had three exams within a day, but in spring 2024, only 54 students faced the same challenge.
An important distinction for Gutekunst was that the initiative is not designed to eradicate the registrar staff, but rather to augment their work and expedite processes that previously took hours or days to complete.
Bucknell’s assistant registrar, Vince Pellegrini, whom Gutekunst calls a hero, organizes much of the exam schedule each year and previously did so by hand, like doing a sudoku puzzle, optimizing the schedule for factors a computer couldn’t dream of, such as faculty preference for classrooms.
The new tool is distinct in that it doesn’t require a computer scientist or any of the project team to generate the schedules; the registrar’s office can use it independently and modify the weight of various factors as needed, creating an optimized starting point for their work.
Now, Gutekunst’s team of researchers is preparing for publication and to make the website more widely available as an open-source tool.
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