Your professor is teaching a class on education and selection. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Rowan Adeyemi
Some universities have proposed admitting students by lottery among all applicants who meet a minimum standard, rather than ranking applicants and admitting the highest. Supporters argue that ranking beyond the threshold measures coaching and background as much as ability, and that a lottery is honest about the uncertainty. Critics reply that it discards real information, that it would discourage effort at school, and that applicants would find a random refusal harder to accept than a reasoned one. Should admission above a threshold be decided by lottery? Why?
Kwame
I support it. The decisive point for me is that the difference between the applicant ranked two hundredth and the one ranked four hundredth is smaller than the error in the measurement. If you cannot tell two candidates apart reliably, ranking them is not using information, it is inventing it, and inventing it in a way that quietly rewards whoever had the better preparation.
Hanne
I take the measurement-error point, but Kwame moves from it too quickly. Even a noisy signal is worth something, and discarding it entirely is only rational if the noise swamps everything, which nobody has shown. What I would want before supporting a lottery is evidence about the threshold itself, because all the judgement that used to happen in the ranking now happens in setting that line, and nobody is scrutinising it.