Timetabling university examinations

The problem of timetabling examinations is one which is faced by most educational institutions, with the problem becoming particularly acute in institutions of higher education. The situation may be formulated generally as a 0-1 integer programming problem but, in common with a number of other timetabling problems which have been reported, a heuristic approach is more practical and produces an acceptable solution. The procedure described takes account of the obvious constraints imposed by examination-room availability and capacity, and the need to avoid clashes between common examination papers. In addition, the examinations are scheduled such that the students are faced with a minimum number of occasions when two papers have to be taken in the same day and, for ease of marking, the larger courses are examined early. A computer program to implement the heuristic was developed and was found to produce a better timetable than the previous manual procedure as well as considerable saving in clerical effort.