Tuesday, January 09, 2007

CORS Tutorial Balloting Strategy

Having just recieved the results of my tutorial balloting via CORS, I decided to explore the tutorial slots still available for balloting. As I had expected, the tutorial balloting results reflects the student population's balloting strategies.

To provide a general idea of how the tutorial balloting results are, I'll copy the results for one particular module.

T1[25/25]   T2[25/25]   T3[17/25]
T4[6/25] T5[6/25] T6[3/25]
T7[25/25] T8[25/25] T9[25/25]
T10[22/25] T11[12/25] T12[13/25]

Each set of 3 slots corresponds to a tutorial in a certain timeslot. For example, T1, T2, and T3 all correspond to the same timeslot.

Assuming that each student has a specific preference for a certain timeslot but no preference for any tutorial group within that timeslot, it becomes obvious that the most prevalent strategy for tutorial balloting is to rank the slots (for the desired timeslot) in numerical order.

However, since that is the most prevalent strategy, it also means that those who adopt that particular strategy face the greatest competition in their tutorial balloting. This situation is analogous to that of a discoordination game (or congestion game), where the player is rewarded for making a dissimilar choice to the majority. However, if everyone adopts the same strategy for making a dissimilar choice, eventually everyone makes the same choice and the strategy fails (badly!).

Hence, although I would certainly advise students to not rank their ballots in numerical order, if everyone does so, my advice would be useless! In anycase, I always rank my ballots in reverse numerical order. But, please, do not adopt my strategy!


*P.S. For more pseudo-useful advice regarding bidding or balloting strategies, refer to this previous post.*

5 comments:

JH said...

Ah, thats EE2010's. I cant get T7 T8 T9 slot, looks like its a damn hot timeslot sia. =(

The Negative Man said...

Wah. Looks like I was quite lucky, I got the T9 slot.

In fact, after checking again, I discovered three of my core tutorials slots were 'hot'. I must either be lucky, or that my strategy was useful.

JH said...

Anyway, my strategy is abit different from urs. I usually go for (taking the example of T7 T8 T9 timeslot) the order 8 9 7. However, for 2010, i chose 7 9 8 cos someone recommended the T7 tutor. Looks like a bad choice.. =(exs

The Negative Man said...

I kinda guessed your strategy from your blog.

Anyway, how did you recieve knowledge about which tutor taught which tutorial slot ?

JH said...

Hmm i am not too sure, my friend told me one.