In 1976, R.N. Burns and C.E. Haff gave an algorithm for finding the kth-best spanning tree of an edge-weighted graph as well as the kth-best base of an element-weighted matroid. In this paper, after introducing the concept of a convex weight function defined on the vertex set of a connected graph, the following result is proved: Let H = (S, I) be an independence system, where I is the set of independent subsets of H, such that all the maximal independent subsets of H are of the same cardinality. Then a necessary and sufficient condition for H to be a matroid is that, for any weight function W defined on S, the algorithm of Burns and Haff gives a labelling of the family of maximal sets in I as B1, B2, …, Bn such that W(B1) ⩽ W(B2) ⩽ ··· ⩽ W(Bn).