This page provides information about editing sittings. This is divided into “Overall Settings” which are values which control the sitting as a whole, and “Rooms & Seats” which concerns individual rooms and seats.
A “Sitting” has seats which need candidates to sit in them. A “Sitting” belongs to an offering and takes place starting at a particular time. The offering and start time identify the sitting: for example, CS 241 Winter 2021 on 2021-02-26 at 12:30. Rooms, and therefore the seats within them, are selected for a sitting.
Overall Settings
These are the fields that can be set when creating a sitting, or changed later using the “Edit” form, a link to which may be found on the main page for each sitting. Unlike the case with examinations, course staff will usually find that these settings will not need adjustment after the initial creation of the sitting.
- Start Time
- The date and time when candidates allocated to this sitting are to begin writing their examinations.
- Duration
- The amount of time for which the sitting runs; typically equal to the longest duration of every examination using the sitting.
- Seating
- Settings which control how seats are used.
“Assigned” means each candidate will be assigned a specific seat; the examination schedule page will show them their specific seat assignment. Assigned seating is pseudo-random and makes it harder for students to cheat with others. “Not Assigned” means candidates will not be assigned specific seats; the candidate’s schedule page will list all rooms in their sitting that have seats available for non-assigned seating.
- Exam Independent
- This setting has two possibilities: “Exams Together” and “Exams Independent”. “Exams Together” (default option) means that the sitting owner is in charge of actually running the examinations, and will be administering them all together, not performing separate steps broken down by examination. “Exams Independent” means that the actual administration of the examinations will be done separately. In particular, “Exams Independent” means that individual signature lists will be produced for each examination.
Rooms & Seats
Typically adjustments to rooms and seats will be made using the “Sittings & Rooms” section on the main page for an examination. Rooms can be added using the add room form, provided that they have already been booked through the usual mechanisms. Removing a room requires clicking on the room to view the room map. From there, the individual examinations can be removed from the room using the form built in to the examination list near the top. Once the examinations have been removed, the option to remove the room from the sitting will be offered.
The most common adjustment for course staff to make to rooms and seats other than adding new rooms is to reserve some seats so that the system will not use them. This may be done for various reasons depending on the needs of each individual course. To do this, select the wanted seats using the checkboxes, select the status “Reserved” from the “Reservation” drop-down, and click “Update”. If candidates are already seated, it will be necessary to also select “Yes” from the “Unseat” drop-down.