Wharton Changes Course Selection Method
This year, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is piloting a new program for course selection to replace the bidding system it previously used to assign courses. The change is a response to Wharton’s recent curriculum overhaul.
Like many other business schools, Wharton used to use a bidding system to assign students to popular courses. In a bidding system, schools give students a particular number of points that they use to “buy”, or bid on, courses they want. The bidding process takes multiple rounds, and the students with the highest bids at the end ultimately get a place in a popular class.
However, generations of students found that this system could be easily gamed. Business school students would buy seats in core courses in the first round and then sell them back as prices rose. With skill, students who bought and sold courses would end up with enough points to buy slots in the popular classes. A few students would end up with a fortune in non-monetary currency, allowing them access to the most popular courses while other students could not take a single popular course.
Course Match works differently. Students provide a ranking of their class preferences and a computer algorithm designs a schedule. There is no longer any bidding. Initial studies suggest that the new system is fairer to all students: a second-year student’s chance of enrolling in one of the most popular courses at Wharton increased by more than 50 percent compared to last year’s bidding results.
Wharton gave students the chance to beta test the new Course Match system by allowing them to choose classes for the Spring semester using the bidding system and Course Match. A majority of students surveyed preferred the schedule that Course Match created for them over the schedule they created through bidding.
