Generating Placements

Once you have added your students, classrooms, and configured any preferences, restrictions, or required placements, you are ready to generate a balanced placement.

How to Trigger Generation

To generate a placement:

• Open the Workspace Overview for your placement workspace.
• Review your placement settings (default students per classroom and boy/girl difference allowed per classroom) and adjust if needed.
• Click Generate Placement to start the process.

The button is disabled while a generation is in progress. You will see a loading indicator until the process completes.

Free accounts include 3 placement generations per workspace. After the third generation, Shibutz keeps every existing result readable and shows an upgrade prompt before another generation starts. Pro users can generate unlimited placements.

Before You Generate

When you click Generate Placement, Shibutz first looks for obvious setup problems in your workspace. If something makes a valid placement impossible, generation stops right away and you see a short message naming the issue and how to fix it. These blocking checks include:

• No students or no classrooms — there is nothing to place or nowhere to place students.
• Capacity overflow — total classroom capacity, or a single classroom's capacity, can't hold the students placed into it.
• Impossible gender balance — the boy/girl gap is too large to split across your classrooms within the allowed boy/girl difference per classroom.
• Invalid required placements — a required placement points at a student or classroom that no longer exists, or duplicates a student across classrooms.
• Contradictory rules — a pair appears in both preferences and restrictions, or restricted students are forced into the same classroom.

Risk-only situations (such as a student separated from more peers than you have classrooms) are surfaced as warnings rather than blocks, so you can still generate intentionally. The Constraint Health card on your workspace overview uses the same readiness check as the Generate Placement button. It shows separate blocker and warning counts; expand it to read each problem and a suggested fix before you generate.

What Data Is Used

When you click Generate Placement, Shibutz sends your saved roster (including notes), classrooms, and rules to the placement service. Keep roster data limited to what your school authorizes for placement. The placement generation documentation explains how to use these placement rules:

• Specific students and destination classrooms as required placements.
• Student pairs who must be kept apart as restrictions.
• Classroom capacity and boy/girl balance settings.
• Student friend requests and separate staff preferences alongside the four scales as classroom balance goals.

For service providers, retention information, and AI-related questions, see the student data handling guide.

Processing Time

Wait for the run to finish before starting another. Processing time depends on roster size, constraints, and the placement service.

If generation takes longer than a minute or cannot return a complete result, Shibutz shows an error without saving a partial placement. Wait briefly, then try again.

Handling Failures and Warnings

Shibutz checks for missing or duplicate students and classrooms before saving a result. Each student must have one classroom assignment. If a result fails these checks, it is not saved and you can try again.

The checks before generation above catch specific setup problems, not every impossible combination. If Shibutz cannot find a valid placement after those checks pass, you will see an error message. Common causes include:

• Too many constraints — Conflicting restrictions, required placements, or an overly tight boy/girl balance limit can leave no feasible arrangement.
• Classroom size too low — The classroom capacity setting does not leave enough room to fit all students.
• Conflicting rules — Two restricted students are both required to be in the same classroom, or other contradictions exist.

To resolve failures:

• Review your restrictions and required placements for conflicts.
• Review your settings with authorized staff. Change capacities only within school-approved staffing and policy limits; check whether the boy/girl difference is feasible for the roster.
• Correct outdated or mistaken rules and generate again. Do not remove a necessary separation or support requirement to bypass a blocker.

Generating a New Placement with Different Parameters

You can generate placements multiple times. Each run produces a new result based on your current data and settings. This lets you:

• Experiment with different constraint combinations to see how they affect classroom composition.
• Compare results across runs by adjusting settings between generations.
• Try loosening or tightening specific constraints to find the best balance for your school.

Viewing Placement Results

After a successful generation, the placement result opens directly on your dashboard. You can see each classroom with its placed students, along with statistics about boy/girl balance, scale distribution, and student friend outcomes. Friend percentages do not measure the separate staff Preferences list. For a detailed walkthrough of the output, see Understanding Results.

For more information on how the algorithm processes your data, see How the Algorithm Works.