Abstract

Scheduling examinations in a large academic institution is a complicated and time consuming task. Though, there is a large volume of research in the area of examination scheduling a huge gap between theory and practice exists. Each institution has its own academic set up and specific constraints, that a general method or algorithm that works for one system may not produce the desired result for the other. In this paper a multistage technique that is in successful use for scheduling examinations at IIT Kharagpur is elaborated. The method partitions the examination data into a three sets, each of which is scheduled independently. The first part comprises a set of subjects for which the soft constraint compliance has a high priority. The second stage involves the isolation of subject sets that can be scheduled independently followed by the third stage that schedules remaining subjects based on the lecture schedules and the final stage fine tunes the timetable to satisfy soft constraints. .

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