Examination scheduling (general)

• Students can register for session and end-of-semester examinations in the third and fourth week of each semester.
• Quantity per session: Approximately 6,000 students, taking an average of 7 examinations each, results in approximately 40,000 individual examinations.
• These registrations are subsequently processed (e.g. grouping examinations which have to take place at the same time.)
  

The scheduling of written examinations is a particularly tricky task as conflicting options often have to be taken into account:

• A student’s examinations must under no circumstances clash. Neither should they be planned for the same day, if at all possible.
  
• Almost all examinations are attended by students enrolled in different programmes, i.e. the examinations for all of the programmes concerned must take place at the same time.
  
• However, the time slots allotted to examinations within a particular programme should also be spread out in a sensible manner.
  
• Up to 60 written examinations within a programme must therefore be spread out in such a way that each selected examination combination is possible.
  
• Moreover, all examinations should take place during the first three weeks of the session.
  

These often conflicting options are the reason why additional restrictions – date requests – cannot be taken into account.

For students, this results in examinations being scheduled on mornings and afternoons as well as on Saturday mornings and – depending on the examination combinations selected – sometimes leads to examinations being held on several consecutive days.
The advantage of this is that each combination of examinations selected by the students is possible.

• As soon as the dates of the written examinations have been established, a date questionnaire is published in eDoz
  
• You can indicate when you are available during the session for oral examinations.
  

When scheduling oral examinations too, conflicting options often have to be considered:

• On the one hand, examiners’ schedules should be as compact as possible.
  
• On the other hand, from the students’ perspective, examinations should be spread over as broad a period of time as possible.
  
• Additional problems are created by examinations with several examiners, in particular
  
• A lack of common dates for all of the examiners involved in an examination.
  

Several preliminary drafts are needed to create the definitive schedule. Finally, each individual schedule is processed manually. In so doing, a large proportion of the oral examinations are rescheduled in an attempt to find the best solution for all concerned.

• The whole process of scheduling examinations – from registration and optimisation through to the personal examination schedule – takes approximately three and a half months.
• The personal examination schedule is published for students in myStudies and for examiners in eDoz
  

• Once the personal examination schedules have been published, individual dates within the examination session can be rescheduled, by arrangement with all of the parties concerned.
  
• Any justified examination rescheduling must be notified by means of an Download Online Rescheduling Form (PDF, 484 KB). The rescheduled dates are published by the Examination Office.