Scheduling algorithm/problem

Question

I'm bored, and this problem just haunted me again. Back at university, I used to always wonder how they schedule exams. The ability to schedule 10k student to do exams in 2 weeks and guarantee that no student will have an exam in two consecutive periods. I'm assuming some form of heuristics be applied.

I'm bored tonight, and if you give me the right tools, I'll work on it tonight and up to the weekend

cheers, dassouki

EDIT 1: I guess the assumption would be that all we know is the following:

1. Number of students and the courses that they're each enrolled in
2. Number of exam period spots

Answer 1

This is a famous computer science problem (the exam scheduling problem) which is known to be NP-hard. You might not be able to solve it over a weekend.