Efficiency and fairness criteria in the assignment of students to projects

Abstract

Teamwork has increasingly become more popular in educational environments. With the also increasing mobility trends in the educational sector, internationalization and other diversity features have gained importance in the structure of teams. In this paper, we discuss an assignment problem arising in the allocation of students to business projects in a master program in Norway. Among other problem features, the students state their preferences on the projects they most want to conduct. There are also requirements from the companies that propose the projects and from the program administration. We develop a bi-objective approach to consider efficiency and fairness criteria in this assignment problem. We test the model using real data of 2017 and 2018, in joint collaboration with the administrative staff of the program. In light of the good results, our proposed solutions have been implemented in practice in 2019 and 2020. The implementation of these solutions have been beneficial for the administration, the students, and the companies.

Quality Analysis of PDCA-Based Edupreneurship in 21st-Century Higher Education

“…For evaluation, entrepreneurship lecturers at Tangerang Raya University carry out structured evaluations such as exams or quizzes to measure students' understanding of edupreneurship lecture material. Several other approaches can be used to evaluate edupreneurship learning, including: a) formative assessment (Wibowo, 2017), b) Feedback from students (Firmansyah et al, 2020), c) Business project tasks (Rezaeinia et al, 2022), d) Business Presentation (Russo et al, 2023), e) Written Report (Tumiran et al, 2021), f) Team Evaluation (Cristina & Ferreira, 2020), g) special exams or tests (Yalçin & Kurnaz, 2021), h) Portfolio (Villamil & Hallstedt, 2021), i) self-evaluation (Leicht, 2018), and j) end-of-semester evaluation (Okmawati, 2020). For followup, lecturers analyze the results of evaluation and feedback to determine whether there needs to be adjustments in the way of teaching or material delivered.…”

Single-sex schools VS mixed-gender schools: comparing impacts

“…Additionally, exposure to diversity in the classroom can enhance students' understanding of different cultures, perspectives, and experiences, fostering empathy, and promoting democratic citizenship [29]. Also, the importance of diversity and inclusion in preparing students for the post-graduate work environment diversity has been highlighted [30] [31].…”

Multi-fair Capacitated Students-Topics Grouping Problem

“…To consider both efficiency and fairness, Magnanti et al [12] solved a CPLEX integer programming formulation with two objectives: maximizing the total utility computed by the rank of student's preferences (efficiency) and minimizing the number of students assigned to the projects which they do not prefer (fairness). Besides, Rezaeinia et al [19] introduced a lexicographic approach to prioritize the goals. The efficiency objective is computed based on the utility, similar to [12].…”

“…For example, fairness w.r.t. workload distribution and students' preferences has been discussed in group assignments [6], assignment of group members to tasks [14] or students to projects [19]. Student satisfaction is typically assessed as the number of topics staffed [11] or the sum of the utilities of the topics assigned to students based on the ranking of preferences chosen by students [12].…”

“…The group cardinality can be satisfied by the heuristic method [15], or the hierarchical clustering approach [9]. However, providing a grouping solution that simultaneously satisfies all three requirements is hard [19].…”