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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Just curious, why do you care?  It's been established that it doesn't change the fact that each parent needs to pay careful attention to the order they rank the schools.  What changes whether you are right or the PP is right?  [/quote]

For an individual family, the best strategy for ordering your picks changes upon which algorithm is being used.

There are two competing ideas being proposed here: 1. that the order of your ranking affects the weight given to your pick; and 2. that the order of your rankings does not affect the weight given to your pick. For brevity, I will refer to #1 as the "incorrect" idea and #2 as the "correct" idea.

Under the correct idea, there is no advantage in doing anything other than ranking your picks in the order of your actual preference. The only time you should even consider your odds of getting into a school is if there are more than 12 schools that you would consider going to, in which case you have to consider whether including a school that you have a near-zero chance of getting into means leaving off a 13th school that you would attend if you got into it.

Under the incorrect idea, you have an edge getting into your highest ranked school. If you use that pick for a school where you have zero chance of getting in, you have wasted that edge. The optimal strategy is to use that edge where it is most likely to help you, which is a school where you are likely to get in with the edge and unlikely to get in without it. It doesn't matter if that is in fact your number one choice. This strategy involves knowing something about your relative chances of getting into each school, which you can derive from looking at last year's results. It also involves knowing something about the size of the edge. Since the edge doesn't exist, that information is impossible to obtain.[/quote]

I hope someone prints this post out and faxes it/emails it to the lottery and asks them which algorithm is correct, or at least which premise about the importance of ranking is correct.  I may bring it with me to the Expo because I'm sure they'll be there.[/quote]

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