A reader named Karisa Cloward, a school teacher, needs your help. Her dilemma calls to mind earlier blegs about roommates/rent and dividing up a loved one’s earthly goods.
This fall I will be teaching a class on African politics. For the class, each student will be responsible for being the class expert on one African country. There will be about 30 students, and there are more than 50 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, so there are enough countries to go around. I want each student to represent a different country, and I also want to make sure that certain “important” countries will definitely have a representative.
In allocating countries to students, I would like to balance fairness, choice, and speed. The fairest and fastest approach would be for me to just randomly assign my preferred countries to the students, but I want to give them some choice in the matter. I think that students will be more engaged if they are representing a country they already have an interest in. Unfortunately, by introducing choice, I also introduce the possibility that multiple students will want to be the expert for the same country, and there is probably some trade-off between fairness and time in determining which student will actually get that country and which countries the losing students will get. The fairer the process – perhaps something involving multiple rounds of bidding – the more class time will be eaten up.
Does anybody have ideas for a fair and relatively fast way of allocating countries that still gives the students some choice in the matter?
Thanks!
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Maybe you could have each student choose 3 countries they are most interested in and list them in order of most wanted to least wanted as homework (to save class time). In the next class you could have the students in alphabetical order by last name (to ensure fairness) report the country they want, if a student chooses the same country by the time you reach their turn to report, they simply go to their 2nd choice and so on.
Randomly assign the students an order, and allow the students to pick in that order, with an option of “Don’t Care”. Students cannot choose a country already selected. If the student doesn’t care then assign them one of your preferred countries. I have a hard time believing that the students would both all care about what country they selected, while simultaneously not select any of the “important” countries, which I’m guessing are well known ones like South Africa, Nigeria, etc.
This is simple. Draw lots to determine the order that the students pick their country. One student per country. You get the fairness of the random draw and the students still have choice. Even the last student will have a choice of over 20 countries.
J.Ja
Assign the countries randomly and then let the students trade.
Here is a fair way to divvy up the countries in only two rounds (with a little up front work for you). Divide the countries into five or six categories (geographically may work best). Go around and have each student in order select a category. Then have the students go in reverse order to select a country in that category.
Students who pick early get to chose a category before they fill up, but students who pick last get the choice of country within that category.
1) Randomly assign each student a number
2) Allow students to choose in that order
3) Once countries are decided, allow students to trade if both parties agree
You could have each student write down five countries in order of preference and turn those in. Then you could essentially match the students with countries based on how high they ranked them. Every student may not get his or her first choice, but it’s likely they will get one of the countries selected.
Give the students some advance warning – a week, say – and tell them that if they are keen on a particular country they have to demonstrate that keenness by doing something about it – prepare a short report, or a video, about the country. Find an object from that country. Meet someone from that country etc. etc. Make them demonstrate their commitment by doing something about it. Then, if you have several contenders for a given country, you can gauge it by how much commitment they’ve shown to the cause.