Reply to Who do I write to to advocate that Yu Ying join the common lottery?

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Reply to "Who do I write to to advocate that Yu Ying join the common lottery?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, sorry that that these wankers have mangled your innocuous thread.

PS.  Hope you've learned to avoid advocating a thing where YY is concerned.  [/quote]

Meh, OPs original assumption that the common lottery ranking takes care of YY's concern about getting parents serious about Chinese isn't really true.  Common lottery computer only looks at your random assigned lottery number for the most part, not how you ranked the school until it gets to you.  Parents who would rank YY #1 but got a random lottery number of 480 would NOT get in ahead of someone who ranked YY #7 but had a 200 random number, unless 200 got to one of their higher ranked choices, which might or might not happen.

We plan to apply next year and we hope they keep a separate lottery.  [/quote]

First of all, you're discounting the fact that not everyone who gets into YY through the separate lottery would choose YY as a first choice. Remember, the line standing is only for the waiting list, so someone could apply online the day before the lottery closed and have just as much chance of getting in as the people who stood out in the cold for 8 hours.

[b]Second of all, I think you are misunderstanding how the lottery works. My understanding is that it looks at people's #1 choices first, and matches as many of those people as possible. In subsequent rounds, the "accepted" kids will only be displaced by students with sibling preference (and in-bounds preference for DCPS) or by people with better numbers. So for any school with few seats, the ones who match are going to be siblings and those who ranked the school highly AND had an excellent number. Someone who had a truly excellent number is not going to match with their number 7 school unless they chose 6 schools with no seats available[/b].[/quote]

Different poster, but PP your understanding of the common lottery is wrong.  It would be so much better if it worked through #1 picks first; but it doesn't.  It takes the person with random lottery #0001 or however many there were, and taking preference groups into consideration (siblings and IB where applicable) it works through all of that #0001 person's list to match them, and then moves onto #0002.  Person #9999 pretty much has zero chance in Hades getting matched anywhere on their list of 12 unless they apply to a school that never has a waiting list.  If it went through #1 rankings first, that would be much fairer, but person #0050 who ranks Yu Ying 11th has a better chance of getting in than person #0600 who ranks Yu Ying #1.

You are right that the best numbers will be matched with their higher choices.  What you are missing is that the people with really good (not "great") numbers will be the ones to get the waitlist numbers that fill up the few spots that get vacated by people higher up turning them down.  There is still no way someone who ranks YY #1 stands a chance if their overall random number is less than great.

The other option that would make the current lottery much better is if it did an individual lottery for each school (all within the one algorithm).  So for the 12 schools any given person applied to, they would get a separate random lottery number for each lottery.  They would have 12 chances to get a decent number, and the computer would sort by preference groups, random lottery numbers, and parent ranking, and match according to all 3.

If they figure out how to have the algorithm consider the parent's ranking of schools as well as random lottery number and preference, that would be a great improvement.  But right now, it's all about your random lottery number and preference group, and your own ranking order of schools doesn't help you much with a less than very good lottery number.  Only 1 shot for all 12 schools.[/quote]

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