Software that finds the optimal college schedule for you
I know at my school, there’s a schedule generator that you use to pick your schedule and it generates like 50 schedules with the classes you’re deciding to take, then you pick whichever schedule you like and works best for you. In terms of deciding what to take, I personally would rather not take classes late in the evening since I don’t mind early classes because I wake up early everyday. Just try and space out your classes throughout to week so you aren’t bogged down with a shit ton of classes on a few days.
My kid's school has the same thing. I played around with it when teaching them how to register/choose classes and it was awesome. You could load in the course description and numbers and the generator would say there were like 855 schedule options. Then remove 8 a.m. classes and professors with low RMP scores and it would be down to 546 schedules. Remove the Friday afternoon labs, check to make sure there was enough travel time between class locations, choose a few options to optimize your study time (one longer break between classes instead of several smaller one), and in just an hour or two of playing, it was all narrowed down to about 5 good choices.
Far better to use a schedule generator than paper and pencil!
When I was at Franklin & Marshall College we created a tool called Prospective Course Planner. It did not have intelligence to take preferences into account and suggest choices, but it did let you search the semester schedule, choose sections, and see how those sections would look on a 7-day calendar.
PS, upon realizing the initials were PCP, I started calling it "Project Angel Dust", much to the chagrin of my boss...
This software does exist, my college just starting using a similar generator. But I still like to do it myself. Yes, it takes like, 2-4 hours for me to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that everything is right. But I am very particular about my schedule and have lots of different competing interests to juggle that no current algorithm can measure.
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