Assigning students to blocks of elective courses

Abstract

Importance: the process of assigning university students to blocks of elective courses. Purpose: the development of an algorithm to find a fair matching of students by elective courses and dividing a set of students into «subgroups» for joint study of courses. Research design: the problem is considered as a problem of finding matching in a two-sided market, where the sides to the market are students and elective courses. Assuming that the preferences of agents from the «elective courses» market side are the same for everyone, a modification of the deferred acceptance algorithm is proposed to find a matching. The division of students into «subgroups» is based on a mixed integer programming model. Results: a three-step algorithm is developed in the paper to find an optimal fair matching for assigning students to blocks of elective courses based on their preferences and ratings (academic performances). The numerical results are obtained for full-scale data. They demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to the procedure that currently used.