Vince Pellegrini, assistant registrar, academic planning (center, hand up), discusses Bucknell’s final exam planning during a meeting on planning excellence with the project team, including Samuel Gutekunst (right), John D. and -Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Data Science.
Emily Paine/Bucknell University
The last week of the academic term is often stressful for students as they submit their final assignments and prepare for exams. Although finals themselves can be taxing, the exam schedule can improve students’ academic and emotional skills.
May 2024 Student Voice Survey conducted by Within Higher Ed and Generation Lab found 31 percent of respondents believed that a revised schedule that skipping exams or finals would significantly increase their academic success. This was the third most popular option out of a list of 15 options.
Creating an effective final exam schedule requires a lot of calculation and thought by the registrar’s office, and that sometimes leaves students with complicated hours when taking exams.
So a group of faculty and students at Bucknell University created a tool to help staff as they plan for each semester’s evaluations, measuring factors important to students, faculty and the institution that they hope will result in minimal disruption.
Setting the stage: The problem of scheduling exams is not a new challenge in higher education, and it depends on many factors at each institution.
At Bucknell, the staff schedules finals before the extension period ends, so there is no way to tell which students have conflicts in their schedules before the term begins.
The university also often combines major courses across sections to offer a one-hour exam—for example, all Calculus 1 sections take the final exam at the same time—which deviates from the traditional way of using class meeting time to set a schedule and can make scheduling difficult.
Samuel Gutekunst, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Data Science, has been waiting for years to fix Bucknell’s finals schedule problem and get the green light in 2023 to start building tools for the registrar’s office to deal with the challenges.
Put into practice: The project—college collaboration between Gutekunst; assistant professor of mathematics Lucas Waddell; Thiago Serral, a former professor of analytics and performance management who now teaches at the University of Iowa; and a group of student researchers—Clara Chaplin, Tsugunobu Miyake and Stanley Gai—began that spring.
Over the next several months, students created a Tableau dashboard, which pulls historical enrollment data to create a heat map of sorts that identifies trends in enrollment to determine which classes may have similar enrollees. The tool proved useful in supporting the registrar’s office, creating an easy way to visualize enrollment trends.
From there, students created a web tool to create a portfolio of schedules that split the tests to minimize challenges for students. The site is internally called “exam scheduling tool” but will likely be called BEAST (Bucknell Exam Automated Scheduling Tool) in future releases, Gutekunst said.
A spring 2023 student survey at Bucknell helped researchers determine which factors were most important in the finals program, and these criteria, when compared to university policies and procedures, helped finalize the program. The project team identified four “disruptions” that should be avoided in the student assessment process, including:
- Cross-examinations
- Three tests in 24 hours
- Back-to-back exercises
- An evening exam followed by a morning exam
- Four tests in 48 hours
Now, the employee must log in to the database, click “run” and let the tool create four different timetables. Staff can also make changes directly to the schedule using drag and drop, which generates a new report on how many students are disrupted, allowing for real-time comparison of arrangements.
Impact: After launching a new website in the process of creating a finals schedule, the number of students with complicated schedules decreased.
In the spring of 2023, the finals program affected 1,182 students. But a year later, 432 students had a disruption in their program as they were produced by the device.
“We went from about 30 percent of Bucknell students having at least one disruption in their test program to about 11 percent,” Gutekunst said. “Removing many of these will make for a less stressful exam week and better for student success.”
Most of these students have back-to-back exams and “they are sad, but they are very different now,” Gutekunst said.
Another area that improved significantly was the number of students who had more than three exams scheduled within a 24-hour period. In the spring of 2023, 243 students had three tests during the day, but in the spring of 2024, only 54 students faced the same challenge.
The key difference for Gutekunst was that the system was not designed to eliminate registration staff, but rather to increase their workload and speed up processes that previously took hours or days to complete.
Bucknell’s assistant registrar Vince Pellegrini, whom Gutekunst calls a hero, organizes much of the exam schedule each year and previously did it by hand, like doing a sudoku puzzle, and fine-tuning the schedule for things a computer wouldn’t dream of, like intelligence. class preferences.
The new tool is unique because it does not require a computer scientist or project team to create schedules; The registrar’s office can use it independently and change the weight of various items as needed, creating a first place optimized for their work.
Now, Gutekunst’s research team is preparing to publish and make the website widely available as an open source tool.
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