Load Students

When using PowerSchool to create a complete master schedule, you need to be familiar with both building and loading a master schedule.

The build process creates the master schedule by placing courses in specific rooms during certain periods and scheduling teachers to instruct those courses. The load process places students in a schedule that has been or is being created, based on their course requests. Effectively, the build creates the master schedule and the load creates the student schedules.

Although students are loaded into the schedule as it is building, this is not necessarily an optimal load. Students who are loaded into the schedule earlier have an advantage over those loaded later. Their course requests are more likely to be met. Also, while these students may be fully or close to fully scheduled, theirs may not be the best possible schedule that the system can create based on the completed master schedule.

When the students' schedules were created during the build process, the best possible schedules were chosen for them at that time; however, the build was not complete and optimized, and the system could not take into account any changes made to the schedule after they were loaded.

The build function only does one pass; it does not go back to review better alternatives for courses already scheduled.

Once you have built a satisfactory master schedule, you can begin fine-tuning student schedules by running a load. While this function has no impact on the number of students enrolled in courses, it could have a positive effect on section balances. For example, it is possible that during your first load, you gain eight students in one course, five students in another, and ten in a third. Then, you can try again to help individual students get all of their course requests.

Do not load students into your master schedule until you are satisfied with it. Loading will not have any impact on the structure of the schedule, just on the placement of students within it. Also, do not make manual adjustments to student schedules and then reload students because the system will overwrite all of the changes you made.
Loading is required in most cases. You need to load if you entered alternate course requests or global substitutions, or if you chose to close course sections at a maximum number. The build process does not handle these factors, which are not considered unless you load. Also, if you are making manual adjustments to your master schedule, you need to do a load under most circumstances.

After running a load, analyze the results. For more information, refer to Analyze the Results. After analysis, proceed with one of the steps outlined in Post-Load Options.

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