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The timetabling problem involves the scheduling of a set of entities (e.g., lectures, exams, vehicles, or people) to a set of resources in a limited number of time slots, while satisfying a set of constraints. In this paper, a new variant of the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, named FastSA, is proposed for solving the examination timetabling problem. In the FastSA’s acceptance criterion, each exam selected for scheduling is only moved (and the associated move is evaluated) if that exam had any accepted moves in the immediately preceding temperature bin. Ten temperature bins were formed, ensuring that an equal number of evaluations is performed by the FastSA, in each bin. It was observed empirically that if an exam had zero accepted movements in the preceding temperature bin, it is likely to have few or zero accepted movements in the future, as it is becoming crystallised. Hence, the moves of all exams that are …