Skip to main content

Seating Plan

Overview​

A significant upgrade has been made to the Seating Plan feature within the Examinations Module. These comprehensive updates are meticulously designed to provide examination administrators with unparalleled flexibility and precise control over how students are arranged for examinations, ensuring a fairer and more secure environment.

Key Enhancements​

Let us explore the key changes and improvements:

Seating Restrictions​

This enhancement introduces a fundamental capability to define and enforce restrictions on student proximity based on their academic programs or "branches."

Core Functionality:​

Administrators can now configure rules to prevent students from specific branches from being seated directly adjacent to one another. This is particularly crucial when students from different, but possibly related, programs are taking the same examination.

Purpose & Benefits:​

  • Enhanced Exam Integrity: By strategically separating students from certain branches, the system significantly minimizes opportunities for unauthorized communication or collaboration during exams, thereby upholding academic honesty.
  • Precise Control: The feature allows for granular application of these restrictions on a per-course basis. Within the "Courses" section of the "Update Seating Plan" interface, users can easily select a course and then specify which branches should be restricted from sitting next to each other.
  • Simplified Configuration: As demonstrated in the configuration interface, managing these restrictions is intuitive. For example, if both ECE and EEE students are enrolled in the same exam and proximity is a concern, a simple selection ensures they are not seated side-by-side.
  • Reduced Manual Overhead: This automation eliminates the need for complex manual seating arrangements, reducing the risk of human error and streamlining the overall exam setup process.

Independent Scrolling for Selected Rooms and Order​

This improvement focuses directly on enhancing the user experience (UX) and usability within the "Exam Hall" configuration page, especially for institutions managing a large number of examination venues.

Core Functionality:​

Two critical sections on the "Exam Hall" page – "Selected Rooms" and "Selected Room Order" – now support independent scrolling.

Purpose & Benefits:​

  • Improved Navigation and Efficiency: For extensive lists of rooms, users can now scroll solely within these specific sections without affecting the view of other parts of the interface. This significantly reduces the need for cumbersome full-page scrolling, allowing administrators to quickly review, add, or reorder rooms.

  • Enhanced Focus: By enabling independent scrolling, the system keeps the user's attention on the relevant data they are currently manipulating, leading to a more focused and less distracting configuration process.

  • Better Data Management: This feature ensures that even when dealing with numerous rooms, the selection and ordering processes remain fluid and error-resistant, directly contributing to more accurate seating plan generation.

Room and Subject Ordering​

This powerful enhancement provides administrators with granular control over the automated seating allocation process by allowing them to define the priority for filling rooms and seating students based on their academic subjects. This is accessed via a central "CONFIGURE" option during the seating arrangement process.

3(a). Order Rooms:

  • Core Functionality: This new option allows administrators to pre-define the precise sequence in which examination rooms are to be filled by the seating plan generation algorithm.
  • Purpose & Benefits: This is invaluable for strategic logistical planning. Institutions can prioritize specific rooms (e.g., those on lower floors, rooms with special equipment, or those easier to supervise) to be utilized first. The intuitive interface, featuring drag-and-drop handles, makes reordering rooms straightforward and flexible. This ensures optimal resource utilization and aligns seating with operational needs.

3(b). Order Subjects:

  • Core Functionality: This feature empowers administrators to control the priority of seating students based on their academic program or subject.
  • Purpose & Benefits: It is particularly advantageous when managing exams with subjects that have vastly different student counts. For example, if a program like "CSE" has a significantly larger number of students, prioritizing it ensures that these students are seated first. This approach streamlines the allocation process, prevents potential seating bottlenecks, and ensures efficient utilization of space by accommodating larger groups optimally before distributing smaller ones. The system displays program details, exam types, and student numbers, aiding in informed prioritization.

Seating Patterns​

This enhancement introduces predefined methods for arranging students within the selected examination rooms, offering greater flexibility and security.

Core Functionality:​

Administrators can now choose from various patterns to determine how students are seated inside an exam hall.

Available Patterns & Benefits:​

  • Linear (Row by Row): This is the standard, straightforward pattern where students are seated sequentially, filling one row completely before moving to the next. It is generally the most efficient for maximizing room capacity.
  • Diagonal: In this pattern, students are strategically placed diagonally across the room. This means that a student's immediate front, back, left, and right seats may remain empty, increasing the physical and visual separation. This significantly enhances exam security by making it more challenging for students to communicate or copy from adjacent seats. While potentially impacting maximum capacity, its primary benefit is deterring malpractice.

By offering these distinct patterns, the system provides administrators with the flexibility to choose an arrangement that best meets the security requirements and logistical considerations for each examination.

Minimum Branches Per Room​

This is a critical enhancement designed to promote equitable student distribution and further bolster exam integrity by preventing concentrated clusters of students from the same academic discipline within a single room.

Core Functionality:​

Administrators can define a minimum number of different academic branches that must be seated together in any given examination room. The seating algorithm will then intelligently distribute students to adhere to this minimum.

Purpose & Benefits:​

  • Improved Distribution and Fairness: This feature ensures a more balanced and mixed student population across all examination rooms. It prevents scenarios where a room might be inadvertently filled almost entirely by students from a single branch, which could create an uneven examination environment.

  • Enhanced Exam Integrity: By intermingling students from various disciplines, the likelihood of coordinated cheating or extensive communication among peers from the same program is substantially reduced, contributing to a more secure and fair testing environment.

  • Practical Example: If the setting is configured to a minimum of '3', the system will ensure that each allocated room accommodates students from at least three different academic branches, thereby improving the overall distribution of students across the examination venue.

Overall Impact​

These comprehensive updates to the Seating Plan feature represent a significant step forward in examination management. They empower educational institutions with highly sophisticated tools that not only automate complex seating logistics but also fundamentally enhance exam integrity and administrative efficiency. By offering such granular control and customization, the system ensures smoother coordination of examinations and allows for highly customizable seating strategies tailored to diverse needs and policies.

key pointer(s)

  • Enhanced integrity & flexibility ensures seating restrictions to prevent students from specific academic branches from sitting together and implementing flexible seating patterns (Linear or Diagonal) to optimize security and arrangement within rooms.

  • Administrators will now have more control over the filling sequence of examination rooms and the seating order of students based on their academic subjects, ensuring efficient resource utilization and preventing bottlenecks.

  • Independent scrolling for room selection with the ability to enforce a minimum number of different academic branches per room ensures a more balanced and diverse student distribution in each hall, further strengthening overall exam integrity and fairness.