Forum Discussion
Formula help: randomly assign students to groups based in criteria
Hi Tkelly705 ,
See attached example of a solution that may help you with this.
The formula in column F counts how many students have been assigned to the current student's first choice, and if that is less than the max, he is assigned to his first option, if not we move on to check the second option, etc.
Regards,
Zach
Since you seem to like a challenge, here's my related conundrum.
My school does a choice day where students input their top choices (previously we've just said to do top 4 but we could have them pick top 5 or 6 if it helped with the coding/grouping) and then students are assigned to 4 different sessions throughout the day based on their requests. For example, one student might pick Choice 1, 3, 5, 6 and 9 and need to be put into four sessions based on those selections. They might end up in Choice 3 for their first station, choice 1 for their second, and then have to get a random option for their third and fourth stations because all their other choices filled up.
Totally understandable if that's too many levels of complex but I thought I'd throw it out there! We've had the same one teacher organize the results by hand for the whole school every year and I'd love to help simplify the process if possible. Open to suggestions!
Thanks!
I do like a challenge but I've been real busy with my real job lately. That said I think what I created already is really close to what you need. A few questions:
a) do you like the way my previous answer finds the 1st choice answer above? (I'm guessing so)
b) on the 2nd choice I see calling the above but basically saying the student can't be re-assigned the same activity.
c) now comes the big choice, after the 1st choice is made, what order should we use for the 2nd choice (and then 3rd, 4th, etc). Three options that come to mind are: a) use the same random order, b) create a new random order each time, c) use the reverse of the prior order (this reminds me of fantasy draft order, lol)