The Sorting Hat Goes to College
Published in Mathematics Magazine, 2014
A. Beveridge, S. Wagon, The Sorting Hat Goes to College, Mathematics Magazine, Vol 87, No. 4 (2014) pp. 243–251.
Preprint link: https://github.com/mathbeveridge/mathbeveridge.github.io/blob/master/files/SortingHatCollege.pdf
Every year, colleges place incoming first-year students into themed seminar courses designed to help students to adjust to college life. Students submit a ranked list of courses and are then placed into seminars adhering to constraints such as gender balance. We show how to model this constrained optimization problem using bipartite matching and using integer linear programming. We report on the successful deployment of these methods at Macalester College, resuling in better assignments (happier students) and greatly reducing the manual labor.