Leo's Lottery tool allows students to rank a set of either courses, events, or groups based on their preferences for enrollment. Examples may include clerkship course lotteries, elective and selective course lotteries, and event lotteries.
If a Course/Group/Event is over-subscribed, the Students that indicated their highest ranking for the Course/Group/Event will be given preference. If there are still too many Students with the same preference, the system will randomly select which Students will be selected for the Course, Group, or Event.
NOTE: In order to set up a Lottery, first you need to set up the Elements that will make up the Lottery, and the Groups that will participate in the Lottery. Think of these as the ingredients required to create a Lottery.
Elements consist of either Courses, Events, or Groups based on the type of lottery you are going to implement.
- Course lotteries are the most common. Course lottery elements are the individual course sections (or rotations) that students will be ranking.
- Course Block lotteries are similar to course lotteries, but allow students to be awarded multiple courses that fall within designated block dates. All courses within a single block will have the same beginning and end date.
- Event lotteries allow students to rank a set of events that exist within a specific course. For an Event lottery, the elements are the individual course events.
- Group lotteries allow students to rank various groups according to their preferences. This is most commonly used for a sequence lottery. In this case, the Group lottery elements are individual groups in Leo and may be symbolic of a specific sequence of courses that students will rank.
Lottery Highlights
- Students will be able to rank-order a Group of Courses, Groups, or Events that they would like to join.
- The higher the rank-order for a Course/Group/Event, the better the chances are for getting that Course/Group/Event, but no two Courses/Groups/Events can have the same rank order.
- The system will always try to give Students their top choice.
- If the first choice is no longer available, the system will assign the Student's second choice (and so on).
For example: The Leo Lotteries use a randomized list of Users to determine assignments. If the Lottery is a standard Lottery then this list is randomized every rank, so random list for rank 1, new list for rank 2, etc.
If the Lottery is a Block Lottery then the list gets randomized for every combination of Rank and Block. For example, Rank 1 Block 1 first list, Rank 1 Block 2 new list, etc.
If you have a Lottery that you have run previously, we suggest that you do not run that same Lottery again with new dates for this year. In other words, it is best to set up a new Lottery each time you want to run it.
And if you practice running a Lottery in your Training system, do not expect the same placement/results when you actually run the Lottery in your live Production system, because the Lottery placements are unique to each time the Lottery runs (because of the element of randomness involved in computerized lotteries).
How do students select elements?
If a Lottery (or Signup) in your system has been made available, the Activity Icon (Bell) will have a red number on it. Students can click here to access the Lottery notification and rank their choices.
Signups
- There is no rank ordering for the Signup feature - they are first come, first serve selection.
- Students can sign up for only one of a given number of choices.
Refer to Overview of Signups