A few questions:

  1. From your example, students only express a preference for those sections they are interested in. They do not rate all sections?

    Can it be assumed that they have eual distaste for all unrated sections?

  2. Can a student be in more than one section?

    It radically alters the complexity if they can.

  3. Do all sections have to have students?

    In effect, this question really amounts to: "Do the numbers of places per section, total to the number of students?"

    Also: "Less than?" and "More than?"

  4. What are the orders of magnitude you are dealing with?

    '20 students split across 5 sections with 4 places each' is a whole different kettle of fish to '2000 students across 50 courses with 0 to 20 places each'.

    One is easily solved by brute force with a 'judgement criteria', the other requires a heuristic.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"But you should never overestimate the ingenuity of the sceptics to come up with a counter-argument." -Myles Allen
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail        "Time is a poor substitute for thought"--theorbtwo         "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

In reply to Re: [OT] simple algorithm for assigning students to class sections by BrowserUk
in thread [OT] simple algorithm for assigning students to class sections by hossman

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