The positive potential impacts of the Scheduler tool will first apply to Cal Poly's Computer Science Department. The positive impacts are:

• Teachers will get to input courses he or she can teach and also rank them according to their preferences.
• Added constraints will make schedules more efficient (ie making it easier for students to get to their adjacent classes)
• Student input will help the department figure out not only what impacted previous classes but why those classes were impacted.
• The databases do not hold sensitive data. Instruction information and course data are all publicly available; course and time preferences input by the instruction are not necessarily harmful.

Potential negative impacts can be found depending on the system's design and implementation. There can be issues where the schedule does not meet desirable characteristics. For example, the Scheduler tool's "get best schedule" algorithm could produce a very unfair schedule where some instructors may get all their preferences satisfied and other instructors may not get any.

We also need to be careful regarding whether the schedule is valid or not. Due to the vast amount of conditions that—may or may not—need to be met, finding any flaws will be hard to detect.