Behind The Class Schedule

CS Course Scheduling Workflow Study

The Problem: The CS department's course schedule affects whether students graduate on time, but building it takes a lot of people, rules, and back-and-forth. We wanted to understand how that information moves and where it breaks down.

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My Role: My classmate and I gathered secondary sources, including the registrar's scheduling timeline and the department's undergraduate planning sheets.

Process

1. Interviewed three people involved in scheduling: the department chair, the graduate course scheduler, and the student services and curriculum coordinator

2. Mapped the people and forces involved at the micro, meso, and macro level

3. Built a combined data journey map in Miro showing how scheduling information moves from planning to publishing

Result: We found three main challenges: key scheduling knowledge lives in people's heads, schedulers have to balance strict rules against faculty and student needs, and coordination is split across many spreadsheets and emails. We recommended a shared scheduling playbook, archiving past data and processes, and spreadsheet formulas that flag risks like undersized rooms or time conflicts early.

What I Learned: Interviews showed me things the documents couldn't. The spreadsheets and timelines showed the steps, but talking to people showed why the process works the way it does and where it gets stressful.