Examination Timetabling at the Gulf University Bahrain
Gulf University, which opened in 2001 in Sanad, Bahrain, is a private university licensed by the Ministry of Education in Bahrain and offers undergraduate programmes in Administration and Financial Science, Computer Engineering and Sciences, Engineering and Law. It currently enrols almost 600 pupils and administers around 230 exams each year.
Despite smaller than average enrolment numbers, efficiently administering exams within the university was a challenge, as there is a commensurately small number of timetablers and administrative staff to manage the process. Staff had been using an inefficient legacy timetabling system which left staff with a significant planning workload over the course of each academic year.
The university needed a capability that reduced the administrative workload associated with the complexity of creating schedules for over 600 exams taking account of both staff preferences and student needs. They also needed a solution that was easy for both staff and students to use and provide results which were accurate and easy to read.
While it’s often the case that an EventMAP deployment in a large university or training institution requires some level of customisation or integration with existing systems, Gulf University decided that a completely off-the-shelf cloud deployment of Exam and Collect would satisfy their needs.
Exam has enabled the administration to create and publish timetables with seating plans accessible by both invigilating staff and students. Its new reporting tools allow the university to monitor schedule quality, room occupancy and attendance in a comprehensive way that simply wasn’t possible with their previous system.
Seat planning and allocation, which was once a headache for staff, is now largely automatic for examination periods.
Invigilator preferences and exam attendance monitoring and feedback are fed directly into the Exam scheduling environment through Collect, reducing administrative time around these tasks drastically.
The implementation of Exam and Collect has simplified Gulf University’s processes and reduced the frustration of administration staff and invigilators. The user-friendly visual display of information has made using the software easy for the users when reviewing the results of an automatically created timetable or marking student attendance in an exam.
The university reported a small learning curve, with a minimum of staff training required to migrate to the new system.
The highly customisable constraints allowed the schedulding team to create a solution flexible enough to handle invigilator staff preferences and student needs.
Having a system configured with staff and student information reduced the time and effort needed to generate complex timetables.
Automation has reduced the number of errors associated with manually preparing a complex timetable.
Staff time has been freed up enabling them to allot more time to performing other duties.
The application has helped us manage our exam schedule with much ease. And we believe that it will be a viable solution to other universities here in Bahrain.
