In The Daily Bruin, Tristan Reed suggests that UCLA sort out its class-enrollment system by replacing lotteries with auctions in which student bid equally pre-allocated “Bruin Bucks” for a place in the course:

Suppose a certain Renaissance student wants to take molecular genetics, early romantic poetry, abstract algebra and advanced basket weaving. She really needs basket weaving to complete her engineering degree, so she bids 2,500 BruinBucks for that course and 500 on the other three. Once the bids are placed, a computer decides the winners.

When I first saw the title and read the first few paragraphs, I thought the proposal was for an auction involving actual money, and consequently my Class Outrage nerve was pre-triggered. Turns out that’s not the case; the proposed bidding currency would be fictitious and each student would be apportioned an equal amount. That being said, though, it seems to me that there’s some problems with the proposal.

The major failure of this system is that the allocation and resetting of currency on a quarterly basis doesn’t take into account the lifecycle nature of course selection. Everyone knows that there are a few semesters in which there’s a glut of courses catering to your interests being offered, and other in which it’s hard to round up a single one. If fate has it that the four courses that are absolutely essential to your concentration are offered one quarter, while in the next you just plan to burn off time with some uninteresting junk, there’s no accounting for individual interest—you’ve got the same amount to bid each time. And your bid currency is spread thinner at times when the most courses catered to your interests are offered to you. If Reed’s theoretical basket-weaver is faced with four Advanced Basketweaving Theory classes, she has to either divvy her currency up amongst them. Meanwhile, if Dan Dilettante takes some passing interest in one of the basketweaving classes, he can place all his eggs in one basket¹. Winner: Dan, even though it’d be hard to argue he has more of a ‘right’ to the class than our struggling professional basketweaver.

This all comes with the enormous disclaimer that I have no real experience with the course lottery system at UCLA. Maybe it really is so miserable that it warrants serious reform. Lotteries in themselves are certainly not without major drawbacks. With only a handful of lotteried courses here, we don’t face the same problem.

¹ My sincere apologies for this.