What is it about?

Upon joining one of Ethiopian public universities one big worry of a freshman student is whether he will be placed in a field of study of his first choice. Why not? Unfortunately, life isn't that easy especially in a country like Ethiopia where university programs have very limited capacity, and the competition for some programs is unbelievably tough - as a few programs are preferred by a large percent of applicants. For university administrators, who would prefer to see every student getting her preferred place, but constrained by the limited capacity of available programs, take resort to some reasonable approach to assign applicants to programs using criteria such as previous academic records, performance in specific subjects, applicant demography and others along with applicants' preference ranking for available programs. Imagine an administrator whose responsibility is to assign a thousand applicants in more than 10 study programs taking into consideration all those placement criteria (selection criteria Vs applicants' preferences). Obviously a tasking problem that can take a lot of time and effort. How can we help to make this an acceptable piece of task for administrators? Mathematical programming - linear programming, more specifically - is the solution we propose in this paper.

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Why is it important?

We evaluated the approach using actual data (2013) at the college of Business and Economics, Bahir Dar University. Comparing the results generated by using the proposed method with those manually constructed shows how effective and efficient our proposed approach can be. Our approach can streamline the placement decision process as much as it improves the quality of the decisions. Compared to the previous manual system where only one or two placement criteria were considered, our approach allows the college administrators to easily incorporate additional placement criteria, if needed. Comparison of our approach against manually constructed placement decisions based on actual data for the 2012/13 academic year suggested that about 93 percent of the placements from our model concur with the actual placement decisions. For the remaining 7 percent of placements, however, the actual placements made by the manual system display inconsistencies of decisions judged against the very criteria intended to guide placement decisions by the college’s program management office. Overall, the new approach proves to be a significant improvement over the manual system in terms of efficiency of the placement process and the quality of placement decisions. We invite administrators in Ethiopian universities to look at this paper and appreciate how they can simplify one of their critical decisions with the help of our approach.

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This page is a summary of: A linear programming approach for placement of applicants to academic programs, SpringerPlus, January 2013, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1186/2193-1801-2-682.
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