Automatically open sessions as other sessions fill

[mwest1066]

Some centers may want PrairieTest to open additional sessions automatically as existing sessions fill.

Questions:

• Which institutions would use this, and what is the concrete workflow?
• What sequence of sessions, conditions, and exceptions would PrairieTest need to represent?

Originally raised in discussion #118.

[LynnPhillips]

I would definitely use this feature. We have over 900 seats available per day, but students tend to fill the last 1–2 days of a testing window while earlier days remain relatively empty. This can leave students who have emergencies or wait until the last minute without a seat, even though there is plenty of overall capacity.

I currently work around this by restricting the number of available seats on Thursday and Friday for the entire quarter, then manually increasing the available seats as the week progresses. Once enough students have tested earlier in the week, I can safely release more seats on the later days without risking a large number of students being unable to schedule.

It would be extremely helpful to have PrairieTest automatically release additional seats based on configurable conditions. For example:

• Open additional seats when a certain percentage of earlier sessions are full
• Open additional seats at a specific time/day if earlier sessions have sufficient availability
• Gradually release capacity on later testing days as demand increases
• Set a maximum number of seats that can be released at each stage
• Base the release on overall reservations or remaining capacity across the testing window, rather than just an individual session
• Allow staff to manually override or release additional seats when needed

Other use cases could include automatically opening overflow rooms, releasing reserved capacity for accommodated students, increasing capacity when demand exceeds a certain threshold, or opening additional sessions only when existing sessions reach a certain utilization level.

The key use case for us is protecting availability for students who need the later testing dates while still making those seats available once it is clear they are likely to be needed.