Quantity per session: Approximately 9'000 students, taking an average of 7 examinations each, results in approximately 63'000 individual examinations.
These registrations are subsequently processed (e.g. grouping examinations which have to take place at the same time.)
Die 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 on the same day, if this can be avoided at all.
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 80 written examinations within a programme must therefore be spread out in such a way that each selected examination combination is possible.
Moreover, written examinations with a high number of candidates should take place during the first three weeks of the session.
These often conflicting requirements result in examinations being scheduled on mornings and afternoons as well as on Saturday mornings and– depending on the examination combinations selected – sometimes lead to examinations being held on several consecutive days. The advantage of this is that each combination of selected examinations is possible.
As soon as the dates of the written examinations have been established, a so-called scheduling questionnaire is published.
Examiners can indicate when they are available during the session for oral examinations.
When scheduling oral examinations, conflicting options often have to be considered as well:
On one hand, an examiner’s schedule should be as compact as possible.
On the other hand, from the students’ perspective, examinations should be spread over as long 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 exam.
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 in the autumn semester and approximately four and a half months in the spring semester.
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.
