Students and staff usually prefer exam timetables that are available before the start of the academic year, and in which adequate study time is available between exam papers. One method of constructing exam timetables before registration data of the students are available, is to divide the possible subjects into non-clashing subject groups and schedule the groups as units. As an example the exam timetable for all possible curricula and choices in the curricula of the North West University in South Africa had to be drawn up, giving students as fair an exam timetable as possible. As the lecture timetable is based on subject groups, the problem was to schedule all the groups of subjects, from first year up to fourth year students, in such a way over the available days of the exam, that students would have as many free days available between papers as can be achieved. The main focus of this paper was to define an objective function, taking into account the number of students and a measure of the 'badness' of each student's exam schedule. The objective function was minimized by a variation of the method of simulated annealing, over all possible permutations of the order of papers. The process resulted in a viable exam schedule, with virtually no student having a bad schedule, demonstrating that the method is a practical and effective method of construction fair exam schedules.
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