Generate Master Schedule - Too many sections in same format!

Sarah Herrick

Hi. We are new to BB and are trying out the scheduling functionality. We are a high school with just over 1,000 students. We run a 7-format daily schedule, M - F, and students are scheduled into 6 of the 7 formats (five courses plus a sport). Each term (fall, winter, spring) we offer approximately 200 courses and schedule approximately 600 sections. Our class size averages 12 students so, for example, I need to schedule 24 sections of 11th-grade English. When I generate the master schedule, the system is putting 13 - 15 of those sections into the same format, a couple sections in other formats and then no sections in some formats. I find this odd because I would assume the sections would be spread out (somewhat evenly) across the formats. It's also problematic because then when I generate the student schedules, there are several students without English because there's not a section offered in one of their remaining available formats. Aside from manually spreading out the sections before running GSS, is there something I'm not thinking of?

So far, I can only get to about a 78% success rate on GSS, which still leaves me with nearly 300 students with a conflict or with a missing class. Thanks, all!

Chris Felinski

@Sarah Herrick Have you already assigned teachers and rooms to the sections? Or put the constraints into the schedule. Also, are student requests already put in?

I have had this happen when I run the master schedule without all the information entered - all a certain class will be put into a single period. The master schedule looks to figure out the least number of conflicts and get the most students in, and for me, when I run it without teachers and rooms, it will schedule almost all the math classes the same period because no one would have more than one math class and there are no conflicts when they are all at the same time - but it can't happen because there aren't that many math teachers or rooms available.

Sarah Herrick

@Chris Felinski Hi! Yes, all the course data has been entered prior to running GMS. So, for English, for example, I've added the number of sections that will be offered, the min/target/max size, the assigned teachers and then I check to keep teachers in their homerooms. I suppose I could go through and manually assign at least one section to each format before running GMS/GSS. That just seems unnecessary when, ultimately, the computer should know what's best!