George Mason University

Scheduling Standards

Immediate challenge: Respond to decrease in roster of university classrooms in Fall 2012. This is owing to unforeseen circumstances in the concurrent closing of Science and Tech 2 and the Fine Arts Building for renovation. Goal is to establish standards for spreading out daytime classes and moving some evening undergraduate sections to allow Fall 2012 scheduling to be successful despite the reduced classroom supply.

A sub-group of the Classroom Advisory Committee (CAC) worked together to propose scheduling standards that would support appropriate distribution of classes throughout the day and assure available evening teaching slots especially for graduate programs. Our goals were to arrive at a small set of understandable and fair standards that would allow us to meet these goals with equal effort among colleges. The CAC will track this distribution at the college level at its semi-monthly meetings.

These standards have been tentatively approved by Provost Peter Stearns on November 3, 2011 and should be used as Fall 2012 departmental scheduling requests are finalized. One important goal is to allow departments to schedule initially in a manner that will allow all sections to be scheduled on the first pass, without voluminous follow-up requests to change class times because of gridlock. Thanks to all department Scheduling Coordinators for your assistance in meeting these standards.

Other Reports

• Distance Sections
• Cancelled Sections