[Miscellaneous stuff]

Philip Kendall - Why the Room Ballot Changes are a Good Thing

NB: These are personal views and should in no way be taken to be representative of those of the KCGS Committee or any other body

The major problem with the current system of allocating graduates rooms is that those students who spend four years as a graduate student at King's (normally arts students who do an MPhil followed by a three year PhD, but also certain others, for example students doing Part III Maths who were not at Cambridge as an undergraduate) lose out badly, as they are placed right at the bottom of the ballot in their fourth year, along with, for example, overrunning PhD students. It is not fair on those students who were expected to spend four years at King's that they should suffer in this way.

The solution: see paper above. Basically, those students doing four year courses 'repeat' their second year in the room ballot system.

Is this a good thing? Yes. Some brief assumptions needed before a quantitative analysis:

There are four ballot categories; in order in which they choose rooms:

  1. First years (from outside Cambridge), who are allocated rooms by college.
  2. 3rd year students (old system) / Final year students (new system).
  3. 2nd year students (old system) / other non-overrunning students (new system).
  4. Others (overrunning students and 4th years under the old system).

Under the old system, the number of students in each ballot category would be (with everything rounded to integers):

Students year: 1st years 2nd years 3rd years 4th years
Length of course: 3 4 3 4 3 4 3 4
1st year 22 23 - - -
3rd year - - 22 8 -
2nd year - 22 8 - -
Others - - - 0 8

From this, we can calculate the average position at which a student in every year chooses (or is assigned) a room:

Length of course: 3 4
1st year 23 23
2nd year 90 90
3rd year 60 60
4th year - 109

And comparing this with the new system:

Students year: 1st years 2nd years 3rd years 4th years
Length of course: 3 4 3 4 3 4 3 4
1st year 22 23 - - -
Final year - - 22 - - 8
Other years - 22 8 - 8 -
Overrunning - - - -

And we can again calculate the average position at which a student in every year chooses (or is assigned) a room:

Length of course: 3 4
1st year 23 23
2nd year 94 94
3rd year 60 94
4th year - 60

Note that this change has had one significant effect: 4th year students on a four year course are penalised much less for this, whereas the other changes introduced are small (4 places in the ballot for second year students). Therefore, I believe that the proposed changes are a good thing, and should be endorsed by the open meeting.

Philip Kendall, 3 May 2002; with thanks to Mark Fernie for helpful comments.


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