Clever Groups is used by teachers, corporate team leaders, camp coordinators, and many others. This guide describes things from a teacher and their class of students perspective — the same concepts apply regardless of your context, and can handle up to 1,000 team members.
There are two things to understand: the model (what the pieces are) and the workflow (what you and your students actually do).
A good guess vs. a confirmed best
You can do this by hand — teachers do it every year for the annual school camp. Open a spreadsheet, spend a weekend on it, open a bottle of red. You finish on Sunday night feeling good about it. Then Monday arrives: the students who missed out say so, the parents say so louder, and you realise you were working from instinct, not from a confirmed best arrangement.
Preference Groups replaces the weekend with seconds. Demand Groups goes further: rather than maximizing the overall score, it works to ensure every individual ends up with at least one person they chose — a personal win for each person, not just the best average. The number of possible arrangements grows so fast with class size that beyond about 60–80 students, no human can work through them all. That’s where Clever Groups earns its place.
preference checks per generation · class of 30 students · log scale
Each check asks: is this student with someone they prefer — and would swapping them produce a better arrangement? Demand Groups runs harder than Preference Groups because it works to ensure every student ends up with at least one person they chose. Random Groups places students at random and then scores the result, but skips the optimisation loops — a few hundred checks vs millions.
Three things go in. One thing comes out.
A Team is everyone you want to group together — a single class, multiple classes, a whole year level, a school cohort, or any other group of people. Everyone in it is a Team Member. You can label each person with a category — any label that makes sense for your context: Boy / Girl, High / Mid / Low ability, Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced. Clever Groups uses categories to balance group composition.
Categories are optional. Add them when group balance matters; skip them when any mix will do.
You can have up to 20 teams — one per class, year level, subject, cohort, or any other grouping you need.
Each Team Member names the classmates they’d like to be grouped with, in order. Preference 1 is the most important — Clever Groups works through them in sequence. There’s no fixed limit on the number of preferences.
In practice, 2–3 preferences is typical. Clever Groups tries to honor as many requests as possible across the whole class — not just the most popular students.
Preferences can be entered by the teacher directly for any student who hasn’t yet joined the team — useful when you want to run the full process yourself, or when students are too young to submit their own. Once a student joins and submits their own preferences, they manage their own data.
Joining and submitting preferences is always free for students — no account, no payment, no friction.
Constraints are optional rules you set before generating. Clever Groups respects them all while still maximizing preference satisfaction.
Pairs of students who must never be in the same group.
Specify the number of groups of each size — e.g. two groups of 3 and one group of 4. Groups can be different sizes.
The balance of categories within each group — e.g. 2 boys + 2 girls per group.
What you do, and optionally what your students do.
Everyone submits the same prioritized list of who they’d like to work with. The generation mode determines what Clever Groups does with those lists.
The default mode. Clever Groups works through each person’s list in priority order, placing people into groups that honor as many preferences as possible across the whole team.
Someone may not get their top preference if placing them differently creates a better outcome for everyone else. Clever Groups is always weighing the individual against the whole — finding the arrangement that does the most good across the class.
Students who didn’t submit preferences are placed at random, so each run produces a naturally varied arrangement — no separate randomise option needed.
✓ Keep-apart pairs respected ✓ Runs in seconds ✓ 1 credit per run (free trial & Foundation Free)
Where Preference Groups maximizes the overall satisfaction score across the groups, Demand Groups treats each preference as a demand — working to ensure every person ends up with at least one person they chose. After generation it tells you exactly what percentage had their first preference placed, and what percentage got any preference placed. If someone can’t be placed with anyone they chose given your group sizes and keep-apart rules, it tells you exactly who and how close it got.
Two sub-options control which preferences count:
All preferences — Clever Groups looks across each person’s full list; more options to work with, and more likely to place everyone with someone they chose. Best when students have submitted 2 or more preferences.
First preference only — focuses exclusively on each person’s top choice; best when only one preference was collected, or when only the top pick matters.
✓ Keep-apart pairs respected ✓ Runs in seconds ✓ 1 credit per run (free trial & Foundation Free)
Pure random placement. Every person is assigned to a group without reference to any preferences submitted. Each run produces a very different arrangement.
The satisfaction score and preference counts are still measured afterwards — so you can compare a random run directly against a preference-based one on the same team data.
✓ Keep-apart pairs respected ✓ Runs in seconds ✓ 1 credit per run (free trial & Foundation Free)
Students submit preferences. Clever Groups finds the best arrangement and gives you groups to review, tweak, and apply. Here are four situations teachers commonly face.
38 of 60 submitted preferences — many are new and don’t know anyone yet.
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