| For some reason I am able to understand single-DA better as: 1. All students are sequentially ranked via lottery 2. You walk down the list, and each student gets their pick of schools with remaining spaces open Side note, but it also seems IMO that "fairness" could improve if your lottery position is impacted by your past academic performance. Then the better student you have been, the more chance you have of being higher in the lottery order to select a school. And similar in the debate over which voting system is best, there is also something to be said for preferring that the system being used is easily understandable and feeling fair to the individual, even in the case where it is (slightly) less fair in the aggregate. Then you have the added bonus of fewer annoyed parents suing you, and only the mathematician parents will complain =) And then if you also add in the idea of academic performance playing a role, parents can rationalize their situation as having been under their control all along - if their child had performed better, they would have had the ability to choose earlier in the list. Of course, this is all assuming you believe that grades should convey some preferential status. But if you don't believe that, then why have grades at all? |