Powerscheduler: prioritizing classes in a load

[dinhs2025]

I would like students to be scheduled into the classes that they requested, which includes some electives that they can choose and then their 4 core classes.  The rest of their schedule is randomly assigned with other electives (PE etc.).  My issue is that it is filling there schedule with these other electives in place of the core classes that they have to have. This is my first time using Powerscheduler and the person who did this position before me left no instructions and is not reachable so I know she made this work somehow, unless she did it by hand.  I'm trying to avoid having to do that. 

I added all the extra electives in as alternate requests with a priority of 30 compared with core classes that are at 10 for a priority. The only one is scheduled was PE and none of the others despite students having open hours.  When I put them in as electives it schedules them in place of core classes.  How can I find the happy medium on this? 

[JeffG9]

What you should be adjusting is the Load Priority on the Course Preferences page rather than the priority on student requests. Lower number is higher priority so a sample Load Priority set could be:

AP Classes: Load Priority 1

Honors Classes: LP 3

Core Classes: LP 6

Electives: LP 12, 24, 48

Basically, the more important it is a student gets Loaded into a class, the lower the LP number.

The students themselves also have a Priority on their Scheduling Settings page. The lower the number the higher priority as well, so incoming Seniors should have a priority of 10, Juniors 20, Sophomores 30, etc.

[ItsOnlyDoug]

This is handled with the load priority like @JeffG9 mentions. The lower the LP# the more important it is for scheduling. However, for a long time it didn't seem like the LPs were being honored and we reached out to PowerSchool and found that their algo wasn't working as expected and they wanted us to start using a formula for the LPs. It should be 2n+1...So 1, 3, 7, 15, 31.

Now, we've been using this formula for years and maybe they fixed the underlying problem, but there hasn't been any major updates to the scheduler so we haven't changed our practice. Once we implemented this our loads worked better.