Class Schedule Builder

Three published grids, three different gaps

The question this page cannot answer is the one students actually get wrong at registration: how long have I got to get from one room to the next. It is not a matter of judgement. It is published, by your registrar, as part of a standard meeting pattern, and the published numbers differ by a factor of three.

Read from each registrar's published scheduling policy on 1 October 2026. Florida State's own wording is “at least a thirty (30) minute break between class section periods”, and its afternoon blocks are spaced 55 minutes apart.

Now compare that against what the grid above this article does. Two blocks are flagged as a possible conflict when they share a day and each one starts strictly before the other ends. That is the correct test for overlap, and it has a consequence: a class ending at 9:50 and another starting at 9:50 is not flagged, because the overlap is zero minutes. Enter exactly that pair and the page reports no conflict. At Alabama a ten-minute gap is normal and the pair would be on-grid; at Florida State the published minimum is thirty and the pair is off-grid; at this page both are clean. The check is arithmetically right and tells you nothing about whether the week is walkable.

The 50-minute hour, and where the other ten minutes went

The gaps are not generosity. They are the reason an hour-long class is fifty minutes, and two registrars say so in as many words.

Florida State: the standard meeting pattern grid is “Predicated on a ‘one (1) credit hour is equal to fifty (50) minutes per semester week’ convention”, and so “a single academic class section of this credit hour value is to meet for a total of one hundred and fifty (150) minutes per week for a semester” for a three-credit course. The University of Miami puts the missing ten minutes where they go: “Under the Federal Department of Education guidelines, each clock hour (60-min) may include a 10-minute break which The University of Miami has calculated into the 15-minutes break between classes. Each credit unit is equivalent to a minimum of 60 min (50 min plus 10 min break).” Boston University defines its unit the same way: a scheduled contact hour is “One weekly, required hour (50 minutes) or equivalent of faculty contact.”

Federal regulation does put a number on an hour, though it is worth being precise about which hour. 34 CFR 600.2 defines a clock hour as a period consisting of “A 50- to 60-minute class, lecture, or recitation in a 60-minute period”, and adds that “An institution must be capable of monitoring a student's attendance in 50 out of 60 minutes for each clock hour under this definition.” That definition governs programmes measured in clock hours, not the credit-hour programmes most degrees use, so it is the origin of the convention rather than a rule imposed on your timetable. The credit hour definition in the same section makes the amount of work “an amount of student work defined by an institution”, and these three institutions have each defined it at fifty minutes.

What one standard pattern costs in grid time

The first two are Florida State's published distributions for a three-credit section. The 165-minute figure is Miami's once-a-week block. The last is Boston University's standard pattern for a class meeting on a single day, listed as “M, T, W, R, F – 2 hours, 45 minutes per class meeting”.

So the same three credits can be three fifty-minute blocks, two seventy-five minute blocks, or one block of nearly three hours. The grid above draws all three honestly, but only as hour rows: a block is shown in every hour row it touches, with no indication of where inside the hour it starts or ends. A 9:20 to 10:10 class fills two rows and occupies fifty minutes.

What “possible conflict” covers, and what it does not

Worth spelling out, because the phrase invites more trust than the test earns.

It catches real overlap, on shared days only. A Monday-Wednesday-Friday class and a Tuesday-Thursday class at the same hour are correctly left alone. Two blocks overlapping by five minutes on a shared day are both flagged.

It does not catch a zero-minute gap, as above. Nor a five-minute one, nor any gap shorter than your institution's published pass time.

It knows nothing about where the rooms are. Neither does your registrar's pattern, which is why the pattern is generous. Florida State says in its own statement of purpose that a standard grid exists partly to allow “students ample travel time to/from their academic classes”, and the thirty-minute minimum was introduced “in order to promote safety and to prepare for the eventual expansion of campus”. A gap sized for a small campus is not sized for a large one.

The grid itself does not show the warning. Conflicts are marked in the list under the grid, not in the grid. Two overlapping classes appear in a grid cell as two names separated by a comma, which reads as information rather than as a problem.

An off-pattern section is a published constraint, not a quirk. Miami requires that classes not matching a standard meeting time “must start at a Standard Start Time and must End 15 min. before the next Standard Start Time”, with approval by the dean of the school. Florida State classifies any section varying “even slightly” from the grid as off-grid. If a section you want has odd times, that is usually the reason, and it is also why it may collide with everything else you wanted.

The grid opens on 8 AM to 9 PM and extends to cover a block entered outside it

The grid opens on one row per hour from 8 AM through the 8 PM row, which covers up to 9 PM. The time fields impose no limits, and they no longer need to: a block entered outside that window pulls the grid open far enough to reach it, so nothing you enter is left out of the picture. Measured 7 October 2026:

That last row is a real published slot, not a contrived one: Florida State's two-day seventy-five-minute distribution runs “starting at 8:00AM ET and ending at 9:35PM ET”. Enter it and both hours it touches are shaded, which is the most the grid ever claims: it marks an hour a class touches, without saying where inside the hour it begins or ends.

Until 7 October 2026 this section described the opposite, and said so as a known defect: an early-morning or late-evening block was accepted, counted, conflict-checked, listed, and then missing from the picture entirely, and the advice here was to trust the list instead. The summary count and the list were right throughout. The grid was widened; this paragraph is kept because a page that quietly swaps one claim for the other teaches you not to trust either.

Your December exam schedule is decided by the grid you build now

This is the part of registration that nobody checks in advance and everybody discovers in week fourteen. At many institutions the final examination time is not scheduled separately at all. It is calculated from the meeting pattern you picked.

Boston University: “The final exam matrix is a grid of calculated exam times for those classes meeting at standard class times during the semester. In cases where classes are comprised of multiple instruction types, the final exam block will be calculated according to its lecture time.” The patterns it maps from are the familiar ones: “MWF – 50 minutes per class meeting”, “TR – 1 hour, 15 minutes per class meeting”, and the longer single-meeting and two-day blocks.

Three consequences, all of which are decided when you register rather than in December.

A course whose pattern is not on the grid gets a default. Boston University: such classes “are assigned an exam beginning at the start-time of the class during the semester for a duration of two hours.” So an off-pattern section at an awkward hour produces an exam at that awkward hour.

Clustering your classes clusters your exams. If exam times are a function of meeting times, then four courses packed into adjacent Tuesday and Thursday blocks can produce four exams close together. Boston University states that where a student accrues “three or more exams scheduled within a 24-hour period, which may include two days of the week”, and all of them are on the matrix, “the student may reschedule the middle exam to another day and time as coordinated between the instructor and student”. Relief exists; it covers the middle one.

The relief has a deadline, and it is early. Virginia Tech's published Fall 2026 calendar sets 18 November 2026 as the “Deadline for undergraduates to request rescheduling of final examinations”, with classes ending 9 December and examinations running 11 to 16 December. Three weeks of notice, and you need to have looked at the exam schedule to use it. Boston University also notes that final examination dates “will not include weekend days” and that “Final exam changes are subject to both Dean and Registrar approval.”

None of that is in the grid above, and it cannot be, because an exam matrix is institution-specific. The practical move is to find your registrar's final exam matrix during registration, not after, and read it against the pattern you are about to choose.

A lab is a separate block, and it is not priced like a lecture

Add every meeting as its own row, which is what the tool expects. It is also how the credit is awarded. 34 CFR 600.2 handles these under a separate limb of the credit hour definition, requiring “At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1)(i) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution, including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours”. Equivalent work, not the same split between class time and homework.

Which is why a lab occupies more of your week than its credit count suggests. Boston University's published guideline is “1 credit per 1 scheduled contact hour” for classroom courses and “1 credit per 2 scheduled contact hours per week” for laboratories and studios. A four-credit lecture with a one-credit lab is five credits and about six scheduled hours of grid, and the lab is usually a single long afternoon rather than three short mornings. If you are deciding whether a week fits, the credit hour workload estimator gives the hours and this page gives their shape, and the lab is where the two disagree most.

Why the schedule you want is not on offer

Students read a thin set of mid-morning options as bad luck. It is policy, and it is published. Three examples:

Caps on the popular hours. Miami: “Prime-Time for Standard Start and End times are from 9:30 am to 3:20 pm. All academic units may schedule no more than 45% of all their Undergraduate course level (099 – 599) during prime-time.” Alabama states that “Peak hours are between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM” and that departments “should make efforts to schedule courses during non-peak hours”.

Caps on the popular day pattern. Miami again: “A maximum of 60% of courses offered can be in the two-day combination of Tuesday & Thursday (TR). Therefore, at least 40% of course offerings must meet on some combination of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” Alabama requires sections to be “distributed approximately equally between mornings and afternoons and between the different meeting patterns (TR vs. MWF)”.

Alignment requirements that look arbitrary and are not. Alabama: “All classes are scheduled to start at the hour or half-hour”, and “Because the standard meeting lengths are in 50- and 75-minute time blocks, non-standard sections should be offered in multiples of these times to avoid end times that preclude students from registering for courses that may follow the non-standard section.” That last clause is the whole purpose: a section with an odd end time removes options from everyone who would have taken the next block.

The reason this is useful rather than merely interesting is that it tells you where the slack is. Alabama's own stated reasoning is that “The probability of a student obtaining a conflict-free schedule can be greatly increased when the courses are distributed throughout the hours of the day and the days of the week”. The corollary for one student is that a schedule built entirely out of 9:30 to 3:00 blocks is competing for the capped supply, and the 8 AM and after-4 PM rows of the grid above are where the uncontested sections are.

What this page does not know

Your institution's passing time. It accepts any gap including none. The published figure is ten, fifteen or thirty minutes depending on where you study.

Where the buildings are. No location-aware check. The optional location field is a label only.

Your final exam times. Derived from the meeting pattern at many institutions, and not computed here.

Term dates. One generic week, so a lab meeting in alternate weeks, a course running only in the second half of term and a class cancelled for a holiday all look identical. The semester date planner is the calendar side.

Sunday, and anything before 8 AM or after 9 PM. The day list runs Monday to Saturday, and the grid rows open on 8 AM to 9 PM and extend to cover anything you enter outside that.

A class crossing midnight. An end time earlier than or equal to the start time is refused, which is correct for a timetable and means an overnight block cannot be entered.

Printing. The Print view button calls your browser's print dialogue, and the stylesheet carries print rules, so the output is the grid rather than the article around it.

Whether any of it is real. Nothing here is checked against a course catalogue. A section number, a room and a time you typed from memory will be laid out exactly as neatly as one you copied from your official student system.

Sources

• University of Alabama, Class Scheduling Policy: the MWF 50-minute blocks from 8:00 a.m. with ten-minute gaps, the Tuesday/Thursday 75-minute blocks with fifteen-minute gaps, the hour-or-half-hour start rule, peak hours of 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, the even-distribution requirement across mornings, afternoons and meeting patterns, the multiples-of-50-and-75 rule for non-standard sections, and the reasoning that distributing courses increases the chance of a conflict-free schedule.
• Florida State University, Standard Meeting Times: the fifty-minutes-per-credit-hour-per-semester-week convention, 150 minutes a week for a three-credit section, the MWF and Tuesday/Thursday standard grids, the minimum thirty-minute break introduced effective Spring 2021 to promote safety and prepare for campus expansion, the 8:00AM to 9:35PM span of the two-day pattern, and the on-grid and off-grid classification.
• Boston University, Course Scheduling on the Charles River Campus: the fifteen-minute pass time between classes and the 8:00 AM to 8:50 AM then 9:05 AM to 9:55 AM block pattern.
• Boston University, Final Exam Policy: that the final exam matrix is calculated from standard class meeting times and, for multi-component classes, from the lecture time; the standard meeting patterns it maps; the two-hour off-block default starting at the class's own start time; the rescheduling of the middle exam where three or more fall within a 24-hour period; that exam dates exclude weekend days; and that changes need Dean and Registrar approval.
• University of Miami, Course Schedule Policy and Standard Meeting Patterns: the fifteen-minute break between classes and its derivation from a credit unit of 50 minutes plus a 10-minute break, the requirement that non-standard sections start at a standard start time and end fifteen minutes before the next one, the 50, 75 and 165-minute blocks, prime time of 9:30 am to 3:20 pm with a 45% cap on undergraduate sections, and the 60% cap on Tuesday/Thursday offerings.
• 34 CFR 600.2, definitions of clock hour and credit hour: the clock hour as a 50- to 60-minute class, lecture or recitation in a 60-minute period with attendance monitorable for 50 of 60 minutes, and the separate credit-hour paragraph covering laboratory work, internships, practica and studio work at an equivalent amount of work.
• Boston University, Course Credit Assignment Policy: the fifty-minute scheduled contact hour, 1 credit per 1 contact hour for classroom courses and 1 credit per 2 contact hours for laboratories and studios.
• Virginia Tech, Academic Calendars: the Fall 2026 deadline of 18 November for undergraduates to request rescheduling of final examinations, classes ending 9 December, and final examinations from 11 to 16 December.

Every figure on this page was read against the sources above on 1 October 2026. Your schedule is saved in your own browser and is not sent anywhere. More: the rest of the MyCampusKit tools.