Practice Summary: Optimal Student Group Reassignment at U.S. Naval Academy

Abstract

The U.S. Naval Academy is composed of 30 companies of students. Each student has a merit score, and each company has an average merit score. Leadership desires to minimize the deviation in average merit scores by splitting each company into first-year and upper-class groups and reassigning first-year groups to new upper-class groups. We perform this reassignment using greedy and optimal approaches. The standard deviation of average merit scores is reduced by more than half. History: This paper was refereed. Funding: This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research Global [Grant N0001421WX01983].