One in 36,346,430,478
One ACC student believes he’s found the answer to ACC’s annual scheduling fiasco.
36 billion and plenty of pocket change. That’s the total number of possible schedules that each ACC student had to sort through last year in order to find the single one that best suited his or her needs. Beyond belief? Think again. After meticulously entering all of the scheduling data from last year into a database and using a simple algorithm to calculate the total number of possibilities, it took my PC only a split second to come up with this staggering result. But for ACC students, finding the right schedule is anything but easy. For many, it can be downright painful.
When you first look at the scheduling sheets that were handed out this past Thursday, the astronomical amount of possibilities may not be apparent, but the abundance of options and ultra-tiny print can be just as daunting. In the past, the scheduling season has been one of the year’s signature hardships for many a distraught student. Today’s sophomores, juniors, and seniors are all too familiar with the long, tedious, and often extremely chaotic process of balancing credits, required courses, honors classes, and lunch buddies.
This mass-confusion finally spurred me to take action last year. The turning point came during a late-night musical practice when I was approached by Megan Frey (’08), who was obviously at her wit’s end about the whole scheduling business. She had gotten all of the necessary approval to take her honors and Advanced Placement courses, but she was running into a dead end when it came down to actually arranging the classes into her schedule for the next year. Certain classes can only fit in certain blocks, and that leaves certain ones open, but ah! If you move Chemistry over here, that moves Philosophy over here, and now there are different options where Philosophy was…
The cycle continues until you are forced to scribble all of the different scenarios on a crumply piece of scratch paper while sitting in the middle of a cold hallway floor. A short time later, with decrepit sheets of paper at your feet, blackened from cross-outs and nervous doodling, you are overcome with fear at the thought of there being no schedule in the world that could possibly satisfy all of your requirements. Did I miss one? What if I just try…no, that won’t work! Oh, I can’t believe I have to take AutoCAD 3rd block…I sure hope I can draw…Why can’t I just find my perfect schedule?!
As Megan and I were contemplating our class line-ups, the mounting frustration reached a climax when my train of thought suddenly careened into an oncoming thought. “You know, I bet you could make a program that could find all of the combinations for you,” I told Megan. “In fact, I bet I could do something like that.” After all, I had gained a decent amount of experience in the previous months from toiling over the ACC Forums (www.accforums.com), and I had the itch to apply my new skills to bigger and better projects. But with this simple statement, I had unknowingly enslaved myself to my own relentless ambition; I guess you could call me an addicted problem-solver. Sure enough, just a few short months later and barely two weeks into summer, I began working—determined to revolutionize the scheduling process and abolish the miserable task of arranging classes once and for all.
My initial approach involved generating every possible schedule and then simply making a web application that would find the best one from the lot. However, as my preliminary schedule-generating experiments revealed, this method would be incredibly slow and largely impractical. With each possibility consisting of only 8 small numbers (a minuscule amount of data in the computer world), some 100 million-and-something results had consumed more than an entire CD-worth of space. Doing the math, all 36 billion combinations would take up some 450 CDs! Besides being difficult to store, searching through such a gigantic amount of information would be painfully sluggish. I obviously needed to take a different approach.
After much brainstorming, I settled on making a schedule generator which could take the user’s input and conjure up the appropriate schedules on the fly. After all, by specifying just a few classes, the number of possibilities gets exponentially smaller. I knew that such an application would be more difficult to put together, but I was up for the challenge.
Skipping ahead some eight months of on-and-off development, I am proud to unveil the fruits of my labor: a web application that I like to call the “Perfect Schedule Builder.” Built from the ground-up to be as easy to use as possible, the program has been painstakingly tinkered into submission. The end result is an application that can help you find your “perfect” schedule in an unbelievably short amount of time.
The process starts off with you specifying your class and gender, after which you are shown a partial list of the classes that you can take next year, organized by subject. Once you specify the necessary required courses as well as any other classes on the page that you plan on taking, the program gets to work and figures out all of the possible combinations. In a few seconds, you have a convenient list of schedules that would have likely taken you a good hour or two to figure out by hand.
The beauty of the Perfect Schedule Builder lies in its flexibility. If you specify fewer than 8 classes, you’ll notice that each schedule contains one or more “open” blocks, each containing a list of the other courses that you can take that period. Thus, it is not necessary to know all 8 classes in order to take advantage of the application—in fact, I specifically designed the program to help students who are still undecided about which courses they want to take. You’ll find it easy to refine or broaden your search by adding and removing classes from your “requirements,” and you can even specify which types of classes to show in open blocks. Furthermore, if you want to discuss certain results with your family, your counselor, or your friends, the schedule results are printer-friendly right out of the box: just click “File->Print…” or press the good ol’ Ctrl+P and you’ll have slick printouts ready to go in seconds.
Of course, to truly appreciate this handy web application, you’ll have to experience it for yourself. The Perfect Schedule Builder is hosted on the Central Times website, and you can get to it directly by going to: www.auroracentral.net/schedule
