Studyo is a dynamic planner. You make schedule changes in Insights; your users see those changes in their planner. Exam periods are a good example where customizing the schedule can help students (and teachers!) better plan and prepare.
You have many ways to customize schedules for exams, depending on your use cases.
Targeting a full grade level
Let's look at the possibilities with the following scenario: Our grade 8 students have a French and an Algebra exam in the morning, and resume normal classes in the afternoon, while other grades have regular classes.
When an exam is for a whole level, the simplest solution is often to create a section dedicated to that exam, which uses auto-enrollment to select all students of a given grade. You give it a relevant name, like "French Exam" and "Math Exam" for our case, assign meaningful values to other fields, and use auto-enrollment like this:
Before talking about its schedule, we must talk about bell times, as you have two ways to specify those schedules.
The better way - Removing other sections
Periods appear in a planner on a given day because bell times are assigned to that day, either by default based on the day of week, or via a special day assigned to that day. You can find those bell times under the CALENDAR section.
Bell times have schedule tags assigned to them. For example, this one is assigned tags "G5" to "G8".
And these bell times are assigned, without any surprise, to Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday at the top of the calendar on the left. We could also have had a single regular schedule assigned to every day of the week.
Then, section schedules must specify one of those tags. Take this for example:
In this 10-cycle-day school, the line above can be translated to "If we're a day 1 and you find a period labeled "G" in a bell times that has tag "G7", put an occurrence of that section in that period.
Customizing the schedule of a single grade while other grades have normal classes can be done by:
Creating a new bell times schedule that uses only that tag:
Creating a copy of your regular schedule that omits that tag:
Creating a special day that regroups those two bell times, with a proper title and symbol, and assign it to the exam day(s).
Notice that we labeled the exam periods "E1" and "E2", removed periods "A", "B", "C" and "D" but left "E", "F" and "G"? This is an example of morning exams day with normal classes in the afternoon. Any section requesting to appear in period label "A" to "D" for a "G8" schedule on that day will get dropped, as none exist, but those in labels "E" to "G" will appear.
Now, we can go to that "French Exam" section we created, and add the following schedule:
That new E1 period, visible only to grade 8 students, will now contain an occurrence of our French Exam section, and the teacher you have assigned to it can publish tasks to students in that period, for example to announce things to study for that exam, or give more details about the rooms. We can repeat the same thing for our "Math Exam" section, with an "E2" schedule.
Our grade 8 students now see a clear and precise schedule for that day.
The faster way - Dealing with conflicts
You might find it too complex to create all those bell times combinations (though they're not lost from year to year). If you're willing to slightly compromise the user experience, you can skip all the calendar parts and stick with adding a schedule to the exam sections, but in a more explicit way:
Here, we chose to use a specific start and end time for a new period, and name it E1. It will get created whatever the bell times available on that day. We'll get back to that exclamation mark button (on the right) below. We repeat for the math exam:
Let's check what this does to a student's planner:
They now see a red triangle in the corner of each period where a conflict was detected. It wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for the exam period appearing under the other periods. Sure, they can click the triangle to change the order, but it's a poor experience.
This can be fixed in two ways. First, the exclamation mark we saw above:
Toggling it ON causes the period to appear above others by default. It can't remove the conflicting periods, since they could be visible to other users not part of the exam section, but at least students now see the exam period above by default.
The second way to fix this involves making sure all course occurrences appearing in one of the three morning periods get marked as skipped. Sure, you could rely on every teacher marking their classes as skipped under their "Teacher" view in Studyo, but an admin can also do this within Insights. On the "French Exam" section, select "Manage schedule conflicts".
It starts on the first occurrence where a conflict was detected and shows you all other classes any student of the "French Exam" section has at the same (all 8th graders in this example).
Everything on the right of the first column (in blue) are class occurrences of at least one student in the French Exam class (so any 8th grader). You can either click the "X" symbol on any period you wish to mark as skipped, or better, use one of these two buttons at the top:
For our use case, we want to use the first button, to skip all morning classes.
And repeat the same thing for the "Math Exam" section, to go from this:
To this:
Once those occurrences as skipped, students will always see non-skipped periods above others by default, which is much better.
Dividing students in smaller groups
Let's say that French exam involves multiple groups from multiple teachers, and you want to create one section per teacher, so you can specify different rooms per teacher, or allow each teacher to publish a task to their respective groups. The idea is the same as for a section auto enrolling a full grade, but now you can use the "Add from other section" button under the "Edit students" option. You can search by section name or code, or by teacher name.
The rest is the same, whether you chose to update bell times or create an explicit period within section schedules.