Exams Scheduling FAQ

This article covers common questions regarding the scheduling of exams in Arbor. If you cannot find an answer to your question in this article, check our dedicated section of the Help Centre on this topic here.

How do I hide EDI Assessables from Exam Candidate timetable schedules?

Hiding EDI assessables requires the Qualifications: Administer All students permission. If you do not have this permission, ask your administration team to give you permission using these instructions.

You can choose to hide assessables from the following pages in Students > Examinations > Scheduling:

• Allocate Exam Rooms
• Exam Clashes
• School Timetable

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Go to Students > Examinations > Qualification Offering and click into the Learning Unit containing the assessable that you want to hide. If you do not see the assessable, click the + button to see all units.
2. Click to expand the Exams & Assessables section and click on the assessable.
3. Click on Shown in Scheduling and change the selection, then click Save.

Please note: This will clear any rooms and seats assigned for the exam candidates. If you change this back to Show in the scheduling section, you will need to re-room and re-seat the candidates. 

Can I stop a Learning Unit from showing up in the Scheduling section?

Yes, you can prevent Learning Units from appearing when scheduling exams (for example, if students are doing two units at once and you do not want a clash to appear on the system) by going to Students > Examinations > Qualification Offering. Click on the qualification and then go into the Learning Unit. Here, there will be a pop-up window where you can tick a box to stop the unit appearing in the Scheduling section of Arbor.

Can we customise Exam Timetables shown on the Student/Parent Portal?

No, it is not possible to customise the formatting of the timetables.

• The timetables will include all exams that the student is entered for, including External and In-house exams. You cannot choose which exams are included.
• The printable download and timetable list on the exams page will be sorted chronologically, with the closest exam in the future at the top, and this cannot be changed.

How do I see exam clashes for coursework?

To see exam clashes for coursework, follow these steps:

1. Go to Students > Examinations > Scheduling > Allocate Exam Room.
2. Select the exam. In here, you will see a tick box to Include Centre Assessed assessables. This includes exams that can take place at any time, such as an Art practical exam, or coursework.
3. If you tick this box, then click Apply. Any clashes between Centre Assessed Assessables and other exams will show. If you untick it, the clashes will not show. This box is unticked by default.

If you then have any clashes you would like to resolve, follow the instructions in this article.

Can we see only our In-house exam clashes?

When accessing the Scheduling > Exam Clashes page, you will see clashes for both your external and iIn-house exams together, but it is not possible to filter the results on this page to only show clashes for your In-house exams. However, as In-house exams usually take place at different points of the year, you can change the date range in the filter at the top of the page to more easily find your In-house exam clashes.

Why are my In-house exams showing as a potential clash?

Using in-house exams, if the exams are scheduled for different times, but you set up multiple exam instances for different in-house exams with the same date and time range, they will flag as a clash.

Once you've seated students for the first exam, you won't be able to seat students in the same seats for the second exam, because the system thinks these seats are still being used by students in the first exam.

You are only able to set up an instance for a period of time so students can sit the exams on different days if they are all doing the same exam.

To resolve this, change the times of the instances. You'll need to:

1. Withdraw the students
2. Amend the exam instance times
3. Re-add the students

You may receive a message that there is a clash when allocating rooms to an exam (Step 4 of this article on creating in-house exams).

This happens if the in house exam instance starts at the same day and time that the candidate is scheduled in an exam sitting for any other exam. Any candidate who is entered into both an instance and a sitting that starts at the same time will show as having a 'Potential Clash' in the Clash Status column. 

You can ignore the message and allocate rooms in the normal way.

Alternatively, in order to prevent the 'Potential clash' indicator from appearing when setting up in-house exams, you can set the in-house exam instances to start on a day when there will be no exam sittings, such as setting the instance to start a day before.