Crunching time-Overlapping exams cause schedule conflicts; future fix nears

Jennifer Griffin / The South End

Amber Becker, a pre-nursing student, studies for an exam in the Undergraduate Library on Dec. 6. Students studying for final exams might find their test schedules overlap one another.

Final exam week is here, and students are dealing with, not only the stresses of studying, the confusion of final exam schedule conflicts.
James Constant, a junior, said he has three final exams scheduled for the same day with overlapping times. In order to fix this, he said he has notified his professors.
"I have e-mailed all my professors and told them about the situation," he said. "So, now I'm waiting to hear from the communications department and my professors."   
Constant said he knows other students with similar exam conflicts.
"There are more students who have the same problem," he said, referring to his COM 2100 class. In that class, five of the 20 students have the same two exams scheduled for the same date and time.

Donna Maniaci, manager of registration and scheduling in the Office of the Registrar, said she has never known of a time where the instructors were unwilling to accommodate conflicts in a student's exam schedule.
"I've been here for a long time, and I don't think I've ever had a case where the instructor did not want to work with a student," she said.

Most of the conflicts that are occurring, she said, are because Wayne State is offering more classes that meet only one day a week. Some of those classes, she said, are not a part of the algorithm that is used to determine when final exams take place.

The algorithm, better known as the final exam calendar, is available for viewing on the Office of the Registrar's Web site.

Maniaci said the calendar "was created for classes that have a Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday pattern."

Sandra Lerman, who works as the scheduling coordinator in the Office of the Registrar, said the calendar has been used for years.

"I've worked here for 23 years," she said, "and I've used this matrix."

Maniaci said that the reason the calendar has been used for many years is because of the lack of another method.

"We had to use this grid because that's all that we had," she said.

She hopes that new, recently purchased software will ease the chaos of exam scheduling.
"The beginning of this year, WSU purchased a scheduling system called Ad Astra," she said. "One of the components is a final exam software piece."
Maniaci said that although the software is not yet in use, she thinks it will be ready for testing in a matter of months.

"We're just working with loading it now," she said.  "It hasn't really gotten off its feet.  Maybe within a few months, we can start testing and start looking at this final exam piece to see if we can better schedule rooms for the final exams."

The software, Maniaci said, will be ready for use by next fall.

http://www.thesouthendnews.com/crunching-time-1.2115565