Reply to Common Lottery Algorithm

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lets be honest - this is tough stuff to understand (see previous 22 pages.) I doubt many of the people even RUNNING the process truly grasp every minute detail of the algorithm and how it sorts or works.  The person here who seems to have the strongest grasp is a self-admitted statistician who has likely had years and years of formal education in the field.

If I were in charge, I may withhold certain information that I could safely assume will only confuse the masses and thereby lead to an attempt at gaming the system that will only penalize them - them being everyone who hasn't had years and years of graduate level math.  In this case, the best instruction I could give them is the simple: rank in order of true preference.  [/quote]

I disagree. There is in fact no math at all needed to understand how the lottery works.  If the FAQ were a little better written this thread would have been one page instead of 22. Basically there are two problems with the FAQ:

1. There was always an institutional reluctance in DCPS (and now OSSE) to acknowledge that if families with a higher preference level get all the seats at a given school, those with lower preference have zero chance of getting a seat. So you get mealy-mouthed sentences like "When there are more students than spaces at a school, students who have a preference (such as a sibling preference) will be the first to be offered spaces. Then, random selection decides which other students will be offered spaces." And we spend 21 pages debating whether that means if in-boundary families take all the slots whether the chances for OOB are just smaller or truly zero.

2. The FAQ doesn't address the question of what happens to families that have more than one child in the same lottery, and two children get accepted into different schools. In fact, the FAQ has the apparently incorrect information that "students will be placed on the waitlist of any of the choices they ranked above the school where they were matched." The unstated exception to that rule is when a child has been accepted to a school the siblings will be kept on the waitlist even if they ranked it lower than the school where they were accepted.

I would also be more emphatic that the best strategy is always to rank your choices in your true order of preference, there is no reason to consider your chances of getting in.
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