Evaluation slot booking
The part of the semester where group chats melt down — solved with a simple grid of slots and one database rule.
The problem
Evaluations, vivas and demos all need the same scarce resource: ten minutes of a teaching assistant’s time, multiplied by a whole class. The usual mechanism — a message thread where people claim times — produces collisions, silent double-bookings and an afternoon of manual reconciliation. Students refresh a chat instead of preparing for the evaluation.
How it works
Course staff define an evaluation period and open a set of time slots. Students see the grid and book an open slot with one tap. The critical part is what happens next: the booking is written to the database with a uniqueness rule — one student, one booking per evaluation; one slot, one booking, period. If two people tap the same slot within the same second, exactly one succeeds; the other politely gets an error and picks another. No race conditions, no “I thought I had 4 o’clock”.
What staff and students get
- Students: a live grid of slots with their own booking visibly confirmed, and the ability to see the date, time and location the course set for each slot.
- Teaching assistants: a roster view of who booked what, in order — ready for the evaluation session, with no spreadsheet to rebuild.
- The course: a full audit trail. Bookings are tied to accounts, not to messages, so “did I book?” has one authoritative answer.
The design decisions behind it
Two choices matter most. First, the uniqueness enforcement lives in the database, not in the interface — hiding a button is not a guarantee; a constraint is. Second, the flow is deliberately minimal: students do not need to exchange messages, confirmations or screenshots, because the system state itself is the confirmation. Anything the course needs to change — opening more slots, moving a session — happens on the staff side and is visible to everyone instantly.
Rescheduling follows the course’s own rules: how late bookings are allowed, whether cancellations reopen a slot, and what happens in exceptional cases are configured by the course staff, since they differ from course to course.
10:00
Taken
10:15
Open
10:30
Booked — you
10:45
Open
11:00
Taken
11:15
Open
11:30
Taken
11:45
Open
12:00
Open
Frequently asked questions
Can I book two slots to be safe?
What happens if I need to change my slot?
Is the booking official?
Track your real marks and book evaluation slots on nuSkor.
The portal is free for students: the marks your instructors publish, class statistics, a privacy-conscious ranking and evaluation slot booking — all in one place.