Your fitness function should have a good gradient over the entire search space. Some impossible schedules are more impossible than others. Take off X points for each instructor conflict, Y points for each room conflict, etc. You'll get continually closer to a valid schedule.

And that's also the "aha!" that I had when I wrote the code I pasted earlier. I was thinking too literally in terms of genetics. I would have considered "impossible" solutions as "stillborn" offspring that should never exist to roam around and mate, so I was stumped trying to figure out how to prevent such an individual from ever ending up in the gene pool.

Once I realized that I could just put them in the "undesirable" category by dinging them for unworkabilities, the GA did the right thing, and kept mixing up the "least undesirable", and within a dozen generations, I had a breeding population that was "in the black" (all hard constraints satisified, and thus now working on optimizing the soft constraints).

Cool.

Well, I learned something. This is always a good thing.