Making School Admissions Fairer?

Making Efficient School Assignment Fairer

Surprisingly, nearly every school district that utilizes a centralized assignment procedure makes a Pareto inefficient assignment. The two objections to the standard efficient algorithm, Top Trading Cycles (TTC), are that it makes unfair assignments and that it allows students to trade school-specific priorities. This paper identifies two shortcomings of TTC: students may trade even after they ...

Making the Rules of Sports Fairer

The rules of many sports are not fair—they do not ensure that equally skilled 3 competitors have the same probability of winning. As an example, the penalty shootout in soccer, 4 wherein a coin toss determines which team kicks first on all five penalty kicks, gives a substantial 5 advantage to the first-kicking team, both in theory and practice. We show that a so-called Catch6 Up Rule for deter...

Financial Reform: Making the System Safer and Fairer

Will the Use of Contextual Indicators Make UK Higher Education Admissions Fairer

In the UK, as elsewhere, the use of ‘contextual’ data has been strongly advocated in order to inform undergraduate admissions decision-making. More than a third of UK universities currently take the socioeconomic or other background context of undergraduate applicants’ attainment into account when deciding whom to shortlist, interview, make standard or reduced offers to, or accept at confirmati...

Speed Dating for Medical School Admissions

Although medical schools take every precaution in selecting benevolent individuals to be trained as physicians, an international study has revealed that 5% of doctors worldwide have recurrent issues that warrant disciplinary action by medical boards. These issues include violations of professionalism, unethical behavior, negligence, and in some cases criminal intent, reflective of deficiencies ...