The Sorting Hat Goes to College

Abstract

SummaryWe describe the solution to a combinatorial optimization problem that arises in higher education: the assignment of first-year students to introductory seminars. We trace the evolution of our implementation at Macalester College, a small liberal arts school. We first describe how the classic Assignment Problem for bipartite graphs can be used. Then we show how Integer Linear Programming leads to more flexibility, as it allows the optimization to be fine-tuned to handle more challenging data sets.