Course and Exam Timetabling for the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, established in 1854, is a professional body for more than 20,000 business men and women throughout the UK and in over 100 countries worldwide. As educators, examiners and regulators, they currently cater for around 3,000 students.
The approach previously utilised by ICAS consisted of the manual scheduling of teaching events using Excel spreadsheets, which, as paper based schedulers will know, comes with its own difficulties in identifying and understanding clashes with their resources. Similarly, their process for handling enrolments for examinations was manual and time consuming, and also involved one-to-one phone conversations with each student to capture their needs.
ICAS required a web application that would automate workflows and processes to provide many new capabilities, including:
ICAS needed a solution for both course and exam events – but, because of their unique requirements, knew that a completely off-the-shelf solution was unlikely to meet their needs fully. Timetabler’s built-in flexibility, plus a custom exam booking feature developed in partnership between EventMAP and ICAS, provided a right-fit solution for ICAS and one capable of servicing professional education courses.
The solution provides user-friendly visual timetables for both staff and students which can be downloaded from Timetabler. Students can log in directly and register for examination events and staff can log invigilator preferences. Timetabler uses this information to schedule a room to suit the event’s requirements.
Timetabler comes with built in attendance monitoring functionality. Student details, including photo and Student ID, help improve accuracy of event and exam registrations.
Feedback and monitoring are ongoing between EventMAP and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland.
Massively reduced frustration thanks to the elimination of resource clashes and double bookings.
Moving from a spreadsheet-based solution to a highly-visual, multi-user solution has resulted in a huge increase in organisational efficiency for ICAS’ administration staff.
Manual workloads were reduced while preference gathering, planning, allocation, and schedule distribution became much faster.
Automated processing in exam enrolment now ensures the complete accuracy of enrolment for exams and room size allocation.
During exam self-enrolment, students now have a significantly improved user experience as the whole process is faster and much more intuitive.
