AI-Based Intelligent System for Personalized Examination Scheduling
Marco Barone, Muddasar Naeem, Matteo Ciaschi, Giancarlo Tretola, Antonio Coronato · Technologies · 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought a revolution in many areas, including the education sector. It has the potential to improve learning practices, innovate teaching, and accelerate the path towards personalized learning. This work introduces Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods to develop a personalized examination scheduling system at a university level. We use two widely established RL algorithms, Q-Learning and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), for the task of personalized exam scheduling. We consider several key points, including learning efficiency, the quality of the personalized educational path, adaptability to changes in student performance, scalability with increasing numbers of students and courses, and implementation complexity. Experimental results, based on case studies conducted within a single degree program at a university, demonstrate that, while Q-Learning offers simplicity and greater interpretability, PPO offers superior performance in handling the complex and stochastic nature of students’ learning trajectories. Experimental results, conducted on a dataset of 391 students and 5700 exam records from a single degree program, demonstrate that PPO achieved a 42.0% success rate in improving student scheduling compared to Q-Learning’s 26.3%, with particularly strong performance on problematic students (41.3% vs 18.0% improvement rate). The average delay reduction was 5.5 months per student with PPO versus 3.0 months with Q-Learning, highlighting the critical role of algorithmic design in shaping educational outcomes. This work contributes to the growing field of AI-based instructional support systems and offers practical guidance for the implementation of intelligent tutoring systems.