We are a small high school of 300 students and wondered if anyone else at a school with similar enrollment has been successful in using the Master Scheduling tool. Please email me at [Email Removed] if you can help. Thank you.

I am interested in this also. Could we please keep this discussion public? Thank you. Cindy Carey Database Manager McLean School of MD [Email Removed]> www.mcleanschool.org

Our Upper School is roughly the same size, and we haven't been able to successfully using the Auto Master Scheduling Tool. I would be very interested in hearing if any school has. Does anyone use online course requests via NetClassroom?

We are a high school of 560 student grades 9 - 12. the first year we had EE we scheduled in our previous database and imported the schedules. The last 2 years we have attempted to use the tool and have been unsuccessful. We ended up scheduling nearly all students by hand. We are dropping EE and moving to a different SIS that can do the job properly. I can be emailed directly at [Email Removed]

We have about 1100 students and we used the online course requests through Net Classroom and it was great! We usually have made our master schedule by hand and then let the program schedule the kids and that worked great -- no problems. Last year we tried the master in EE and had some problems. Hopefully it will be resolved this year, but I would say our master turned out okay -- it had some glitches and some things we had to move around and manipulate by hand but now that we've been using it all Fall, it is fine. I would say it was a "headache" but not "horrible" for us.

We have been successfully using both the EA and more recently the EE master scheduling module for both our middle (210 students)and upper schools(335 students). We found that to make it work you have to do the difficult and time-comsiming preliminary work of strickly defining your cycles, periods and time tables, courses, number of sections, class size, teacher and room resources, etc. We implemented a totally new schedule last year with rotating periods and an 8-day cycle and after the first run of enrolling students we had over 93% of student schedules filled. Larry Fullerton Landon School

I would be interested in hearing what one's definition of "successful" is. I suppose the program does what it is designed to do, and is successful in that respect, but does it do what one would want it to do? For example, GMS (Generate Master Schedule) does NOT use the conflict matrix when placing courses. In our first run last year, when I did not know of this limitation, it placed AP Physics and AP Calculus BC against each other with an 80% conflict between the two courses. I can get those kind of results by writing course names on index cards and throwing them down the stairs and the cards that land on one stair fall in the same period. We are a much larger school than most EE customers, with 937 students and 138 courses - that's COURSES, not classes - and about a 3rd of the courses are singletons or doubletons. I need the program to use the conflict matrix to figure out the best match. Instead, because it does not, myself and another staff member spent a week manually figuring out the best placement of classes. That is just plain nuts in my opinion. One other thing that bugs me to no end is that within the course one sets up MINIMUM - TARGET - MAXIMUM class sizes. Call me silly but I figured that with those three parameters set the program would attempt to load at the target but would go up to the maximum if necessary. It does not. It just uses the target when enrolling students (GSS - Generate Student Schedule) in class sections. It also will fully load a section before moving on to the next so that I ended up with sections of 25-25-25-4. If you hired a human being to do your scheduling and ended up with results like that you would fire him/her. I could go on but I'll stop there. Anthony Celentano [Email Removed] Anthony Celentano Director of Academic Computing Services Pope John XXIII High School Sparta NJ 07871 973-729-6125 x253 [Email Removed]

Amen to that one Anthony, we are around 900 students, with approx. 1/3 of our classes as singletons, and we spend weeks trying to adjust and re-adjust. [Email Removed] [i]--- Edited at 11/2/2007 12:55:24 PM by Peg Goolsby[/i]