Grouping Students

Written By: iSIMS Support

Last updated: September 14, 2025

Grouping Students

Introduction

The Grouping feature in iSIMS is designed to help divide large cohorts of students into smaller, more manageable groups. This is especially useful when scheduling courses for subsets of students within the same programme offering.

?? Important: Grouping should not be used to identify a student’s year of study (e.g., Year 1, Year 2). If used in that way, you would need to manually update the group assignment for each student every year.

Steps to Group Students

1. Navigate to Application > Group Student.

2. Select the programme offering or cohort you wish to manage.

3. Assign students to the appropriate group (e.g., Group A, Group B).

Impact of Changing a Student’s Group

When you move a student from one group to another:

• The system will drop the courses they are currently registered for, except:

  • Courses scheduled for their new group, and

  • Courses scheduled for the default group.

• The student will need to re-register for dropped courses.

  • Students can re-register themselves, or

  • An administrator can manually re-register them.

Best Practices

• Use grouping only to split large cohorts into smaller groups.

• Avoid using grouping to track academic year levels.

• Communicate with students before changing their group so they understand that course registrations may need to be redone.

Use Case Example

A programme offering accepts 50 students in a cohort. To improve class management:

• The administrator creates Group A (25 students) and Group B (25 students).

• Core courses for both groups are scheduled separately (e.g., different time slots or lecturers).

• When it comes to specialized courses (e.g., electives or concentrations), the group can represent the student’s chosen specialization.

This ensures smoother scheduling, prevents timetable clashes, and keeps class sizes balanced.

?? Warning – Interaction with Automatic Scheduling

If you plan to use automatic scheduling, you must ensure that:

• Groups are created before scheduling begins.

• Courses are correctly assigned to groups.

If groups are created after scheduling is already done, the system will not automatically reassign existing schedules to the new groups. You would need to manually adjust schedules or re-run the scheduling process.