Making Order Out of Chaos with a Computerized Lottery
- Published:
- Briefs, Case Studies, Papers, Reports
- Author(s) and Contributors:
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Author(s): Andy Oakland
- Source(s) and Collection(s):
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Presentation(s): CAUSE Conferences (Archives)
Abstract
All undergraduate students at MIT are required to take a number of "HASS-D"(Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Distribution) classes. The number of students in each class is limited, leading to competition for spaces. In the spring of 1994, the HASS office introduced a new system for assigning students to classes. Students ran an application (available on the ~800 Athena workstations, plus dialup servers) which allowed them to select up to six classes in order preference. After students had made their selections, a lottery program made assignments, giving students as close to their top choice as possible, and sent e-mail to the students telling them of their assignment. The lottery has been run for two semesters, and has consistently given over 90 percent of the students their first choice. Once we took a global view of the system, it turned out that there was no problem matching students with their desired classes. Paper presented at CAUSE94, the full proceedings of which are available through this Library as PUB1094.