Many schools use a lottery system to assign students to clerkships or clinical rotations. In a typical lottery, students are asked to indicate their preferences, and they are randomly matched up with available placements.
While this lottery process may seem straightforward, many schools struggle with some common pitfalls when setting up their lotteries. Here are 3 of 5 typical mistakes we’ve seen, and how you can avoid them:
Mistake #1: Assigning each student a lottery number
The scenario: Student names are drawn at random and each student is assigned a number indicating his or her position in the rotation-picking queue. Student A receives the number 1 and gets to pick her rotation first. The last student to be drawn is last to select his desired rotation. After going through one round of selections, the order is reversed so that the last student now gets to pick his top choice first.
or: Students are each assigned a lottery number and placed into a campus/rotation order for the entire year. In this scenario, the student who gets the last number has no choice but to accept the only rotation schedule that remains available.
How to avoid this: While these two scenarios may appear to be fair, a large portion of your students will be left unhappy with their final rotation schedules. To avoid this, allow your students to select multiple rankings. This way you can provide all students with equal opportunity to receive the rotations of their choice while ensuring a higher number of students will receive their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choices and so on.
Mistake #2: Trying to plan all 4th year rotations at one time
The scenario: Students doing their last year of clinical experience are sent one all-encompassing survey and asked to rank their core, selective, and elective rotations for the whole year. A student’s experience at a current internship impacts her decision on what electives to take, and she later decides to drop her previously chosen selections.
How to avoid this: Based on our experience, schools that send students surveys in stages and release the results along the way end up with less drop/adds throughout the year, and happier students overall. If the student knows she has received the pediatrics selective rotation of her choice prior to ranking other open slots, she can focus her other selections on the experiences she wants instead of having to rank pediatrics as a priority over and over again.
Mistake #3: Not giving students a “top choice” option
The scenario: A student has a particular pediatric elective in mind for his clinical rotation, but your lottery process does not account for “top preferences”, so he cannot indicate that this elective is his most desired choice.
How to avoid this: Add an option to your lottery workflow that allows students to indicate their top 3 preferences through a year-wide “top choice” ranking option. By doing this, you will increase the student’s chances of getting his desired rotation. One school that recently implemented this new policy saw 189 out 192 students receive a top rotation/location selection. This really helped to increase student satisfaction!
By avoiding these common mistakes in your rotation lottery setup, you can save yourself time, money, and a lot of headaches. In Part 2 of this post, we will share two other common lottery setup mistakes and tips on how to avoid them. Look for the post in the coming weeks!
In the meantime, if you would like some help analyzing how well your institution is handling your rotation selection process and identifying areas where workflows could be improved, get in touch with us. We will create a mock-up of your lottery process in our system and show you the results.