2.5.5. Viewing Schedule Attributes

It is helpful to evaluate two qualities of a newly created schedule: its fairness and goodness. These measures are of simple numeric value between 0-100, with zero being worst and 100 being best. The intention is to give the Administrator a basic understanding of the quality of the created schedule.

An Administrator may set the weights of the goodness preferences, as seen in Figure 1. There is a sliding bar that allows the administrator to specify the weights. This determines the extent to which each of these preferences plays into the overall goodness measure.

Figure 1: Preference Weighting

Figures 2 and 3 show the appearance of the Fairness and Goodness measures on a schedule, which appear upon expanding the Schedule Quality accordion. This allows an administrator to easily view these attributes of the schedule in question. This provides a way to quickly evaluate the quality of a schedule. The status bar indicates the measure on a scale of 0 to 100 by the color and fill.

Figure 2: Fairness

Fairness is a measure of how well instructor preferences are adhered to. There is a maximmum possible value of 100 that every schedule begins with. For every section that violates an instructor preference, 1 point is deducted. A schedule with a score of 50% would thus have 50 sections that violated instructor preferences. Both course and time preferences are considered in this calculation.

Figure 3: Goodness

Goodness is a measure of how well the overall schedule preferences are met. Each preference is checked to see whether the generated schedule meets its requirements or not. If the schedule fails to meet the requirements, all of the points for that preference are deducted from the total score. The amount of points allocated for each preference is set by the admin in the preference weighting.



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