Best Match strategies?

[Fat Tone]

2 or 3 times a year I have to match up the 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th choices of ~150 students with ~10 available essay choices, so that roughly equal numbers of students get each essay and as many as possible get their highest choice.

I do it all in Excel, partly by hand but mostly by macro. If there is equal voting then it is a fairly simple process, but sometimes the voting is very skewed and it gets more difficult to give everyone one of their choices. I tend to assign all those who vote for unpopular choices first, and then use the macro to select students at random from the remaining pool and give them their highest available choice.

I'm sure there must be better strategies than this.

Any suggestions welcome

TIA

[Paddy]

give them all stuff they dont want

[Fat Tone]

nah - I like it when they are grateful

[GNEP]

Single transferable vote?

Monte Carlo simulation to provoke the highest misery index?

Talk to your local lib dem hopeful and they will be able to describe many wierd and wonderful ways of doing this (I live with one...)

[stcynic]

Fascinating problem. Probably straightforward to someone on the site.

For me I can tell you that there are 15 instances of each essay to hand out (150 total). There are 600 total choices. When there are more than 15 number one choices for an essay, they should go to the ones who do not have a second choice that is available. And then my brain starts to hurt...