Assigning students to groups using general and context-specific criteria

Group projects are an important component in many courses. Instructors can allow students to form their own groups or assign them to increase the effectiveness of the group. Most computational tools supporting the assignment of students to class project groups use some general criterion, for instance, maximizing the diversity of the group members. However, frequently, the instructor needs to consider additional context-specific criteria and preferences which force the instructor to figure out the assignment of the students by hand instead of using a software tool. Difficult and time-consuming, this task can easily result in suboptimal assignments. In this paper, a method is introduced that allows the instructor to combine a general criterion and a flexible set of context-specific preferences to describe the type of groups preferred. The heuristic Tabu Search algorithm finds solutions satisfying most preferences.