Schedule Maker

Brent Wilhelm
Brent Wilhelm
Second Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

We are a new customer this year. We are using Schedule Maker for the first time and are not getting good results. In the past we have used ScheduLogic and have been able to get satisfactory results. We are wondering if most schools are actually using Schedule Maker or are you relying on a third party product to make your schedules. We would appreciate any insight anyone can share.

Thanks
Brent

Comments

  • Chris Felinski
    Chris Felinski
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Brent Wilhelm Hi Brent - we have used the Schedule Maker with pretty good results. It takes some manipulating but in the end, our results have been good. We are a private high school with about 670 students, and when it is all said and done, we have about 95-97% of all our students requests fulfilled. If I just click “schedule” though, it is usually in the 70's in terms of percentage. One way we are different is that my administration will tell me the exact number of sections of each class and who is teaching it, so I manually create all the sections and assign the teachers/rooms to the class section. I then run the scheduler to see what it thinks the best period for each class, then I will make manual tweaks based off the conflict matrix as well as class priority. The first time I did it, it was difficult, but once I got the hang of it, I have had success. I say “I” because I am the one who does the master schedule.

  • Megan Peter
    Megan Peter
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Brent Wilhelm
    I use the schedule maker with what I consider fairly good success. I usually get around 80-85% of students with complete schedules. It sometimes takes a couple of tries, but nothing that is time consuming. I have to do some hand manipulation for the master schedule, but I get at least 65% there. And the rest are because of teacher specific things that I would probably have to do by hand regardless of what program I used. It works a lot easier for our Middle School (approx 200 students) who don't have any choice in classes than it does for our Upper School (approx 300 students) who have a lot more requirements. And I end up checking every student anyway to makes sure all requirements are met. Again, these are things I would have to do regardless of the system.

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