Exam scheduling: A case study

Academic institutions are moving toward automated management of the educational process. One aspect of this process is the exam scheduling. The large number of students, classes, professors, and venues renders the manual scheduling process tedious and useless. In this paper, we describe the efforts of the Arab East College for High Education in Saudi Arabia in scheduling exams in the least number of conflicts, among other constraints. We give the details for a two-stage solution approach; the first stage is a greedy algorithm and the second one is a genetic algorithm. The two algorithms work in tandem to generate the best exam timetable. Automation of this process has greatly reduced the number of conflicts, exam days, and the required venues.