Does the seat order change how students are numbered?

It changes which physical seat each roll number lands on. Row order fills left to right along the front row first, column order fills down the first column before moving across, and snake order runs left to right then right to left on alternate rows so consecutive roll numbers are never diagonal neighbours. Seat labels themselves are always row letter plus column number — A1, A2, B1 — regardless of fill order.

How does it decide which class to seat next?

At every seat it looks at which classes are already sitting in the neighbouring seats, rules those out, and from the classes that remain picks the one with the most students still to be seated. Taking the largest remaining class first is what stops the planner painting itself into a corner and being unable to fill the last few seats legally.

Is this free, and is there a limit on students or rooms?

Free, with no sign-up and no watermark. There is no limit on the number of rooms, and each room can be up to 60 rows by 60 columns. A single class range is capped at 20,000 roll numbers, which is well past what any hall arrangement needs and exists only so a mistyped range cannot freeze the page.

Exam Seating Arrangement Planner – Free Seating Chart Maker

Q: Can I stop students of the same class sitting next to each other?

That is the default behaviour and the reason the tool exists. In strict mode the planner treats the seat to the left, the seat to the right, the seat in front and the seat behind as neighbours, and refuses to place two students from the same class, branch or paper in any of them. If you only care about side-by-side copying, switch to row-only mixing and the front-to-back rule is dropped.

Q: How many students of one class can I mix before it becomes impossible?

Half the seats, rounded up. If you are seating sixty students, no single class can exceed thirty without two of its members ending up adjacent — you can see this by imagining a chessboard, where the most seats you can occupy without touching is every other square. The planner does this arithmetic before it allocates and warns you by name if a class is over the line, so you find out before printing rather than afterwards.

Q: Why does the chart mark some seats with an exclamation mark?

Because the planner ran out of ways to keep that seat apart from its neighbour and would rather show you than quietly produce a chart that does not do what it claims. A ringed seat means the student there shares a class with somebody adjacent. Usually it means one class is too large for the room mix — add a room, split the class across two papers, or accept and move a few students by hand.

Q: What happens if I have more students than seats?

Nobody is silently dropped. The planner fills every seat it has, then lists the leftover roll numbers under 'Not allotted a seat' in the Room lists tab and states the shortfall in numbers at the top. Add a room or enlarge one and the list empties.

Q: How do I seat two different question papers in one room?

Enter each paper as its own group, even if the students belong to the same class. For example 'Paper A 1-30' and 'Paper B 31-60'. The planner then alternates the two papers across the room, which is the arrangement most exam offices want because a student copying from a neighbour is copying answers to a different question.

Q: How do I enter roll numbers like 2021CS101?

Write the range exactly as your institution writes it: 'MECH 2021ME01-2021ME40'. The letter prefix is kept on every roll number, and the zero padding of the first number sets the width, so 2021ME01 through 2021ME09 keep their leading zero. A plain range like '1-45' gets no padding.

Q: Can I split one class across several rooms?

Yes, and by default that is what happens. In spread mode every room receives the same proportional mix of every class, which keeps any single invigilator from facing one entire class and makes the mixing rule easier to satisfy. Choose fill mode instead if you want the first room filled completely before the next one is used.

Q: Can I print a separate notice for each room door?

Yes. The Door notices tab produces one large-type sheet per room listing the roll numbers allotted to it, with the exam name and date if you entered them. Printing from that tab puts each notice on its own page, ready to tape to the hall door.

Q: Can students look up their own room and seat?

The Roll index tab is exactly that list: every roll number sorted in order with its room and seat, which is the sheet normally pinned on the notice board outside. It sorts numerically rather than alphabetically, so roll 2 comes before roll 10 instead of after it.

A seating plan that actually enforces its own rule

Drawing an examination seating arrangement by hand is slow for one reason: the constraint is easy to state and tedious to satisfy. No two candidates from the same class, branch or paper should be within reach of each other. Do it for thirty seats and you will get it right. Do it for six halls the night before an exam and you will not — and the mistakes are invisible until an invigilator spots two identical answer sheets.

This planner does the arrangement the way an exam office would, and then checks its own work. Every finished chart is re-walked seat by seat, and any position where a same-class neighbour survived is ringed and marked. You are never handed a chart that quietly fails the rule it was built for.

How to make an exam seating arrangement

Enter each class as a label and a range. CSE 101-160 gives sixty candidates. ECE 201 to 250 works too, as does an en dash. For institution-style rolls, write them in full: MECH 2021ME01-2021ME40.
Enter each room as rows by columns. Room 101 6x5 is six rows deep and five seats across. Rows run front to back; row 1 is nearest the board.
Choose how strictly to separate. Strict mode blocks all four neighbours. If your benches are long and copying is only a sideways problem, row-only is less constrained and leaves more valid arrangements.
Decide how classes spread across rooms. Spreading gives every hall the same mix, which is usually what you want. Filling packs each room before starting the next.
Read the warnings before you print. They appear above the chart and are the difference between a plan that works and one that merely looks finished.

Why a class larger than half the seats cannot be separated

This is the single most common reason a seating plan fails, and it is worth understanding because no software can work around it.

Picture the seats as a chessboard. To place students with none of them touching, you can use the black squares or the white squares, but not both — the moment you use two adjacent squares, the rule is broken. A chessboard's two colours split the seats in half. So the largest group you can seat with nobody adjacent is half the seats, rounded up.

Seating sixty candidates? No single class can exceed thirty. At thirty-one, at least two of them must end up next to each other, and this is true of every possible arrangement, not just the one this tool produced. The planner runs that arithmetic before allocating and names the offending class, so you can fix the input rather than hunt for a bug in the output.

The usual fixes:

Split the class into two papers. Enter them as separate groups — Paper A 1-30 and Paper B 31-60. Now they count as different groups and can legally sit adjacent, which is fine because their question papers differ.
Add another class to the mix. Two classes of thirty in sixty seats is exactly solvable; one class of forty plus one of twenty is not.
Use more rooms. More seats raises the ceiling.
Relax to row-only mixing if front-to-back separation is not a real risk in your hall.

The four things you need to print

Output	Who uses it	What it shows
Seating chart	Invigilator, inside the hall	The room drawn as a grid, board at the top, every seat carrying its roll number, class and seat label.
Room list	Invigilator, for attendance	A table per room sorted by roll number, with a blank signature column.
Roll index	Candidates, on the notice board	Every roll number in numeric order with its room and seat.
Door notice	Taped to the hall door	The room name in large type with the roll numbers allotted to it.

Printing puts one room on each sheet, so an invigilator carries a single page to a single hall. Seat tints are for the screen; on paper each seat carries its class in text, because office printers and photocopiers cannot be trusted with pale colour fills.

Mixing modes, and when to use which

Mode	Guards	Use it when
Strict	Left, right, front, back	The default. Open halls with clear sightlines in every direction.
Row only	Left and right	Long shared benches where the realistic risk is a neighbour's paper, not the one in front.
Column only	Front and back	Narrow rooms with single-seat rows, or tiered seating.
Block	Nothing	A single class writing one paper, where you just want roll numbers laid out in order.

How the allocation works

The planner walks the seats in your chosen fill order. At each seat it looks at whichever neighbours are already occupied, rules out those classes, and from the classes still eligible picks the one with the most students left to seat.

That last part is what makes it work. A planner that picks arbitrarily will happily seat the small classes early, then reach the last few seats with only the large class remaining and no legal way to place it. Taking the largest remaining class first keeps the pool balanced right to the end. If a seat genuinely has no legal occupant, the planner seats someone anyway and marks the clash rather than leaving a hole in the middle of the hall.

The whole allocation is deterministic: the same input always produces the same chart. That matters more than it sounds, because exam offices routinely reprint a single corrected page and need it to match the copies already distributed.

Notes on roll numbers

Prefixes are preserved. 2021ME01-2021ME40 keeps 2021ME on every roll.
Padding follows the first number. 007-010 gives 007, 008, 009, 010. A plain 1-45 gives 1 through 45 with no leading zeros.
Sorting is numeric. Roll 2 comes before roll 10 in every list, not after it as an alphabetical sort would put it.
A reversed range is corrected rather than rejected — 50-10 is read as 10 to 50.
Two classes may share a label and stay separate groups, so you can enter MATHS 1-30 and MATHS 31-60 as two papers.

Privacy

Roll numbers are student data, and none of it leaves your device. The parsing, the allocation, the charts, the CSV and the printing all happen in your browser in JavaScript. There is no upload step, no account, and no server that ever sees an exam title or a candidate list. Your last settings are stored on your own device so the tool reopens where you left it; clearing site data removes them.

Frequently asked questions

Can I stop students of the same class sitting next to each other?

That is the default and the reason the tool exists. Strict mode treats the seats to the left, right, front and back as neighbours and will not place two students from the same class in any of them. If only side-by-side copying concerns you, row-only mixing drops the front-to-back rule and leaves the planner more freedom.

How many students of one class can I mix before it becomes impossible?

Half the seats, rounded up — see the chessboard explanation above. The planner checks this before allocating and warns you by name if a class is over the line.

Why does the chart mark some seats with an exclamation mark?

Because the planner could not keep that seat apart from its neighbour, and would rather show you than hand over a chart that silently fails its own rule. Add a room, split the oversized class into two papers, or move those few students by hand.

What happens if I have more students than seats?

Nobody is dropped. Every available seat is filled, the shortfall is stated in numbers at the top, and the leftover roll numbers are listed under “Not allotted a seat” in the Room lists tab.

How do I seat two different question papers in one room?

Enter each paper as its own group, even when the students share a class — Paper A 1-30 and Paper B 31-60. The planner alternates them, so a candidate looking sideways sees answers to a different paper.

How do I enter roll numbers like 2021CS101?

Write the range as your institution writes it: MECH 2021ME01-2021ME40. The prefix is kept and the padding of the first number sets the width.

Can I split one class across several rooms?

Yes, and by default that is what happens. Spread mode gives every room the same proportional mix, which stops one invigilator facing an entire class. Fill mode packs each room in turn instead.

Can I print a separate notice for each room door?

Yes — the Door notices tab makes one large-type sheet per room, each on its own page.

Can students look up their own room and seat?

The Roll index tab is that list: every roll number in numeric order with its room and seat, ready for the notice board.

Can I get an attendance sheet for the invigilator?

The Room lists tab gives one table per room — serial number, roll number, class, seat and a blank signature column — sorted by roll number and printed one room per page.

Can I export the seating plan to Excel?

Download CSV gives one row per student with roll number, class, room, seat, row and column. Commas and quotes inside a class name are escaped properly.

What if I only know a room's capacity, not its rows and columns?

Write the capacity alone, like Room 101 30, and a near-square grid is chosen. If you know the real shape, type it — wider rooms mix more easily.

Does this work for a single class with no mixing?

Yes. Block mode seats each group together in sequence and makes no adjacency promise, which is right for one class writing one paper.

Are my students' roll numbers uploaded anywhere?

No. Everything runs in your browser. No roll number, class name or exam title reaches any server, and there is no account to create.

Will I get the same chart if I run it again?

Yes — the allocation is deterministic, so a reprinted page always matches the copies already handed out.

Is this free, and is there a limit?

Free, no sign-up, no watermark. Unlimited rooms, each up to 60 × 60 seats. A single range is capped at 20,000 rolls so a mistyped range cannot freeze the page.

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