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Teacher Preferences

SASIxp Mass Scheduling provides the ability to enter student course requests which include teacher preferences. If the Scheduling Options atom indicates that teacher preferences are to be used in scheduling, the Scheduling Optimizer recognizes and observes teacher preferences. When a course request includes a teacher preference, the Scheduling Optimizer will assign the student only to a section of the course taught by the preferred teacher.

This procedure follows the same steps as standard SASIxp Mass Scheduling to define teacher preferences for use in scheduling.

Enable teacher preferences.

Use the Scheduling Options atom to set the “Check teacher preferences when scheduling student requests” option to “Yes”.

Enter teacher preferences in student course requests.

Use the Scheduling atom to enter a teacher preference with each student course request that is to be scheduled only to a class taught by the preferred teacher. In the following example, the Scheduling Optimizer will consider only sections of Speech taught by teacher 118 - Luce, J when scheduling the student.

Note: If the Scheduling atom does not display the teacher fields, ensure that the “Check teacher preferences…” option is set to “Yes” in the Scheduling Options atom (see previous step).

Confirm that teacher preferences are applied as intended.

The Scheduling Optimizer displays a message in the run log indicating how the simulation is using teacher preferences.

If the “Check teacher preferences…” option is set to “Yes” in the Scheduling Options atom, the Scheduling Optimizer observes teacher preferences associated with student course requests; in this case, a message indicating the number of teacher preference requests in the simulation is displayed in the run log.

If the the “Check teacher preferences…” option is set to “No”, the Scheduling Optimizer ignores teacher preferences in student course requests and displays a message in the run log indicating that teacher preference requests will not be used.

Notes

	The Scheduling Optimizer relies on reading the scheduling options and teacher preferences data from SASIxp database files in dBASE IV format. If you run SASIxp using a SQL Server or Oracle database, a workaround is needed to apply teacher preferences: use the Xpodbc.exe utility (installed with SASIxp) to export the ASOP and ASSS files from the database to dBASE IV files, then copy the exported dBASE IV files to the SASIxp DATAFILE subdirectory. Each time you run a Scheduling Optimizer simulation, you will need to repeat this procedure if teacher preference data has changed.
	The Scheduling Optimizer treats teacher preferences as “must” rules; the program will not ignore a teacher preference to resolve a conflict.
	You can suppress the use of teacher preferences which have been entered in SASIxp by setting the "Check teacher preferences" option to "No" in the Scheduling Options atom.
	The Scheduling Optimizer automatically recognizes teacher preferences and applies them unless the “Check teacher preferences” option in the Scheduling Options atom is set to “No”.

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