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SIS 2000+ Student Schedule Editor

Sec. 8, Resolving Conflicts 

Simply put, a schedule conflict arises when two or more course requests for a student fall in the same period (same term, same cycle day). For example, if a student's course request for Advanced Chemistry is only taught in period 4 and the student has already been scheduled for English in period 4, then the conflict will prevent the Advanced Chemistry course from being scheduled for that student. Since a student cannot be in two places at one time, a decision must be made as to which course takes priority for period 4.

However, if the school offers the same Chemistry course taught in multiple sessions (called "sections"), that is, taught in more than one period, such as; Advanced Chemistry/Sec. 1- period 4, Advanced Chemistry/Sec. 2 - period 5, etc., then there are more possibilities for resolving the conflict and satisfying both course requests. In this example, English could remain scheduled in period 4 and Advanced Chemistry/Sec. 2 could be scheduled in period 5.

The Student Schedule Editor program is specifically designed to help resolve the conflicts of an individual student through the manual scheduling and unscheduling of individual course sections.

For more information on course sections and cycle days see Master Schedule Editor.

As an alternative to manual scheduling, the Walk-In Scheduler feature, outlined in Sec. 9, provides an automatic algorithm for scheduling a student without conflicts.
 

8.1 Conflict Error messages
Schedule conflicts that arise are indicated in two ways:

• Conflict Error, Type A - encountered during Schedule a Course procedure.

When scheduling a course (or group of courses) from the course request list the course request is first highlighted and then the Sched button is clicked. The 'Schedule Courses' screen appears (Fig. 69). Any conflicts encountered will be indicated by the course request in conflict being displayed in bold italic.


Fig. 69

The course section in conflict cannot be scheduled unless the course already scheduled for that period is unscheduled. Click on Done to go back to the main screen without saving. Unschedule the existing course in that period and begin again (see Sec. 5, Unschedule a Course).

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If more than one section is offered for the course to be scheduled, those sections will appear as separate entries in the 'Schedule Courses' screen, such as 1111/2-- French I, 1111/3--French I, etc. (section numbers follow the course ID number after the slash). To continue with scheduling the course request, select a course section that is not in conflict and click on the Save command button to copy it to the schedule grid. Then click on the Done command button to return to the main Schedule Editor screen.
 

• Conflict Error, Type B - encountered during Schedule a Group of Courses procedure

In this procedure a group of courses is selected from the course request list, the Sched button is clicked and the courses selected appear on the 'Schedule Requests' screen (Fig. 70) (for more details see Sec. 6, Schedule a Group of Courses). Any courses that are in conflict with scheduled courses will appear in bold italic as illustrated in Fig. 60. However, courses in this list may already be in conflict with one another before they are even scheduled. If this is the case, Conflict Error Type B will be displayed during the confirmation process as follows:


Fig. 70

Go down the list and confirm each course request to be scheduled by clicking on the line until it is highlighted in yellow. If two course sections are conflict an error message will appear, as illustrated in the example below (Fig. 71).


Fig. 71

This "Master Schedule Selection Conflict" error message occurs when two course sections were selected for scheduling in the same period. The section that was selected first has the priority. Take the following steps to resolve the conflict.
 

1. Click on "OK" in the Conflict message box.

This action will skip the cursor position to the next line. The course in conflict will not be highlighted (Fig. 72) and thus not scheduled is a Save is executed.

Fig. 72
 
2. Select and alternate section, or reverse priority.

If available, select another section of the conflicting course. In the example above 7121/1--PHYSICAL SCIENCE could not be scheduled in period 4 because 3151/1--ALGEBRA was selected first and has priority. However, section 2 of PHYSICAL SCIENCE is offered in period 3 and can be selected for scheduling without a conflict.
- or-
Go back and deselect the course that was first selected in the target period, thus relinquishing its priority status. Then reselect the course section that was in conflict, giving it priority status.
3. Copy

When all conflicts have been resolved and course sections to be scheduled are selected as desired, click on Save to copy the data to the schedule grid. Then click on the Done command button to revert to the main Schedule Editor screen.