It is well-formulated. One could come up with instances of other NP-complete problems that have trivial solutions, like "What if there are only two cities and one road between them? Then the Traveling Salesman Problem isn't that hard!" [1]
If the dean gives you a decently sized list, figuring out such an accommodation is very difficult (it grows exponentially with the number of students).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem