Assigning teachers to courses is a recurring decision in every academic department. The assignment must cover every course, keep teaching loads within limits, avoid timetable clashes and respect teachers' preferences, and doing it by hand is slow. This paper reviews 25 journal studies, published between 1976 and 2025, that apply Operations Research (OR) techniques to this faculty course allocation problem. The studies are grouped into three themes: single-objective linear and integer programming models; multi-objective models using goal programming, AHP weights or fuzzy programming; and a genetic algorithm together with recent real-world integer programming applications. For each study, the context, model, solution method and reported results are summarised, and the models are compared by objective, constraints, software and validation. The review finds that the core model has changed little: binary assignment variables, a coverage constraint, load limits and clash constraints. What has changed is the number of goals and rules modelled and the power of solvers. Recent exact models solve whole departments in seconds or minutes, and where results were compared with manual practice the gains were clear, for example 60% of tutors' preferences met against 31% by hand. However, most studies test a single department, few measure the gain over manual allocation, and uncertainty in the data is rarely modelled. These gaps point to directions for future research.

Keywords— Operations Research; faculty course assignment; assignment problem; integer programming; goal programming; literature review