The optimal exam experience: a timetabling approach to prevent student cheating and fatigue

Emrah Köksalmış, Christopher Garcia and Ghaith Rabadi

International Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 21, issue 3, 263-278

Abstract: University exam planning is a notoriously difficult endeavour that involves satisfying numerous classroom capacity and conflict-prevention constraints. Accordingly, exam timetabling has received much attention in the literature over the years. Despite research advances, student cheating and fatigue continue to persist and are typically addressed separately from timetabling considerations. In this paper, we show how both problems can be addressed effectively by incorporating such considerations into the timetabling. We address a real problem occurring at the Turkish Air Force Academy (TUAFA) and develop two versions of an integer programming model. The first finds a feasible timetable while respecting cheating and fatigue-prevention constraints. The second maximises classroom utilisation, decreasing both the number of classrooms and proctors required. Computational experiments using TUAFA data show that both models are tractable in practice and that by incorporating the objective function, classroom utilisation can be increased by 55% leading to a 43% reduction in required classrooms.

Keywords: integer programming; student cheating; student fatigue; Turkish Air Force Academy; TUAFA; exam timetabling; university exams; higher education; Turkey. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=65408 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijores:v:21:y:2014:i:3:p:263-278

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Operational Research from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().