How a university department coordinator streamlined semester exam invigilation and lab supervision duties for 40+ faculty members—saving hours of administrative overhead without forcing staff to adopt unfamiliar software.
Duty Attendance Rate
Saved per Exam Cycle
New Software for Faculty to Install
Google Workspace Native
At collegiate and university departments, the exam period is notoriously intense. A single academic department coordinator is often tasked with assigning 35–50 professors, adjunct lecturers, and teaching assistants across two weeks of midterms or finals, spanning morning (FN: 09:30–12:30) and afternoon (AN: 13:30–16:30) examination sessions.
Like most educational institutions, the department already ran entirely on Google Workspace (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Calendar). But managing duties purely via spreadsheets caused persistent operational headaches:
When emergency adjustments happened (e.g. a faculty member fell ill), updated spreadsheets were emailed out. Faculty routinely looked at outdated PDF exports or sheet printouts, missing duty changes.
Expecting 40+ busy faculty members to manually find their name in a dense spreadsheet and book 6–8 individual calendar slots led to committing to other duties, forgotten duties and frantic morning phone calls.
Full-scale enterprise workforce scheduling platforms introduced excessive overhead: complex administrative setups, per-seat licensing across large adjunct rosters, and requiring professors to log into an unfamiliar external portal, and learning a complex tool.
Rather than reinventing their workflow or onboarding staff to a new platform, the department coordinator installed DutyRemind directly from the Google Workspace Marketplace. Because DutyRemind runs inside Google Sheets as a native add-on, the coordinator continued using the exact same spreadsheet layout they had used for years.
In DutyRemind's sidebar, the coordinator defined FN (09:15 to 12:30) and AN (13:15 to 16:30). Overrides were added for special shorter Friday exam sessions with a single click.
The spreadsheet list maintained professors' university email addresses in the left column. For each exam date column, placing an X indicated which professor was assigned to that hall slot.
Clicking Extensions → DutyRemind → Sync Calendars generated clean calendar events directly on each faculty member's Google Calendar—including event reminders the day before and 30 minutes before the bell.
DutyRemind requires no weird database formulas. It simply reads your standard grid:
| Row | Col 1 (Email) | Col 2 (Name) | Col 3 (2026-10-20) | Col 4 (2026-10-20) | Col 5 (2026-10-21) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Exam Session | — | 2026-10-20 | 2026-10-20 | 2026-10-21 |
| 4 | Shift Slot Code | — | FN | AN | FN |
| 6 | prof.sharma@univ.edu | Dr. Sharma | X | — | — |
| 7 | prof.patel@univ.edu | Dr. Patel | — | X | X |
| 8 | ta.rodriguez@univ.edu | Alex R. (TA) | X | X | — |
When an exchange happened (e.g. Dr. Sharma swapping shifts with Dr. Patel), the coordinator simply moved the X in the sheet and clicked Sync Calendars again. DutyRemind automatically removed Dr. Sharma from the calendar event, invited Dr. Patel, and refreshed everyone's schedule with zero manual emails.
Because events were placed directly into professors' native Google Calendars on their smartphones with 30-minute popups, forgotten invigilations dropped from multiple incidents per cycle to zero.
Faculty members did not have to download an app, create a new username, or remember another password. They just opened their usual Google Calendar widget or mobile notification.
University IT approved the setup immediately because all scheduling calculations run in google's servers, with strong emphasis on privacy by dutyRemind. Data in the sheet can be exported and stored locally for compliance and audit purposes.
While exam invigilation is the most common use case, universities and educational organizations also deploy DutyRemind for:
Keep your existing Google Sheet. Avoid the complexity of heavyweight workforce suites. Start syncing shift calendars automatically in less than 5 minutes.
Niyogi Labs