Examination scheduling

Contact

ETH Zurich
Examinations Office
HG F 18.1
Raemistrasse 101
8092 Zurich

Phone +41 44 632 20 68
Fax +41 44 632 13 14

exam@ethz.ch

Opening hours

Mon - Fri, 11:00 - 13:00

or as arranged by phone

During registration period
(3rd+4th week of the semester):

11:00 – 13:00 and
14:30 – 16:30

People

Floor plan

Key

Registration period (for session and end-of-semester examinations)

• In the third and fourth week of each semester via myStudies
• Quantity per session: Approximately 6,000 students, taking an average of 7 examinations each, results in approximately 40,000 individual examinations.
• These registrations are subsequently processed (e.g. grouping examinations which have to take place at the same time.)

Scheduling of written examinations

• The scheduling of written examinations is a particularly tricky task as conflicting options often have to be taken into account:
  • A student’s examinations must under no circumstances clash. Neither should they be planned for the same day, if this can at all be avoided.
  • Almost all examinations are attended by students enrolled in different programmes, i.e. the examinations for all of the programmes concerned must take place at the same time.
  • However, the time slots allotted to examinations within a particular programme should also be spread out in a sensible manner.
  • Up to 60 written examinations within a programme must therefore be spread out in such a way that each selected examination combination is possible.
  • Moreover, all written examinations must take place during the first three weeks of the session.
• These often conflicting requirements result in examinations being scheduled on mornings and afternoons as well as on Saturday mornings and – depending on the examination combinations selected – sometimes lead to examinations being held on several consecutive days.
  The advantage of this is that each combination of selected examinations is possible.

Scheduling survey of examiners

• As soon as the dates of the written examinations have been established, a so-called scheduling questionnaire is published.
• Examiners can indicate when they are available during the session for oral examinations.

Scheduling of oral examinations

• When scheduling oral examinations too, conflicting options often have to be considered:
  • On the one hand, an examiner’s schedule should be as compact as possible.
  • On the other hand, from the students’ perspective, examinations should be spread over as long a period of time as possible.
  • Additional problems are created by examinations with several examiners, in particular
  • a lack of common dates for all of the examiners involved in an exam.
• Several preliminary drafts are needed to create the definitive schedule. Finally, each individual schedule is processed manually. In so doing, a large proportion of the oral examinations are rescheduled in an attempt to find the best solution for all concerned.

Personal examination schedule

• The whole process of scheduling examinations – from registration and optimisation through to the personal examination schedule – takes approximately three and a half months.
• The personal examination schedule is published for students in myStudies and for examiners in eDoz.

Rescheduling of oral examinations

• Once the personal examination schedules have been published, individual dates within the examination session can be rescheduled, by arrangement with all of the parties concerned.
• Any justified examination rescheduling must be notified by means of an online form (PDF, 290 kB). The rescheduled dates are published by the Examinations Office.