Course Scheduling:
A Strategy to Support Student
Success Outcomes

A foundational component of scheduling infrastructure is the meeting pattern grid. Sometimes called a block schedule or clock schedule, the meeting pattern grid defines the standard patterns that an institution uses to offer sections.  Scheduling outside of the standard grid can impact all students, but can it impact low-income students and students of color more?  Institutions in the cohort found that a review of section adherence to the standard grid can be a key student success strategy.

Institutions often analyze the number of students who make a grade of D or F or withdraw from a course when analyzing student success.  This data can be used to determine instructional supports required for individual courses.  Within the cohort, institutions are analyzing courses that when taken together are more likely to result in a negative outcome.  While this initiative can help advisors to provide excellent guidance in the course selection process, it also can assist institutions in revising their pathways or student plans to encourage student success. 

No one wants to offer sections with less-than-optimal enrollment and no one wants to inhibit a student’s ability to get a section that they need, but every schedule has some elements of these problems.  Course scheduling is a complex activity on all campuses.  One of the early steps in this project was to provide scheduling effectiveness benchmarks.  These benchmarks allow institutions to see where they stand relative to goals in the industry, and making key scheduling stakeholders aware of the data can be a necessary first step in accelerating the need for change.