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Obtaining quality business school examination timetable under heterogeneous elective selections through surrogacy

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Abstract

Business schools that follow an elective system allows a student to select required number of electives in a semester from a larger pool. The resulting heterogeneous elective selection combinations across students make it challenging to arrive at a quality examination timetable. An examination timetable is characterized by the day, the scheduled slot in the day and the classroom during the scheduled slot for each exam. Five quality metrics for examination timetable are developed and accordingly 0–1 linear integer programs formulated for each metric. Surrogacy as a concept is proposed through which a given problem is solved either through another objective function or through a subset of the problem or a combination of both. The resulting findings indicate the usefulness of the proposed mathematical programs and the developed solution approaches in achieving quality elective examination timetable.

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Availability of data and material

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the author on reasonable request.

Code availability

The codes used during the current study are available from the author on reasonable request.

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The author declares that there was no funding received for this study.

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  1. Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli, Tiruchirappalli, 620024, India

    T. Godwin

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  1. T. Godwin
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The entire content of this paper including study conception, writing codes, analysing the outputs, drafting the manuscript, etc. are the sole contributions of the author.

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Godwin, T. Obtaining quality business school examination timetable under heterogeneous elective selections through surrogacy. OPSEARCH 59, 1055–1093 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12597-022-00590-4

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