In a previous post, I shared 3 of the 5 top mistakes we see when it comes to setting up lotteries for scheduling students into clerkships or clinical rotations. Now, I’ll share the last two common mistakes we often see. Compared to my previous post, these tips are more advanced and may be most relevant to you if you are already using one45’s lottery tools to create your schedules.
Mistake #4: Planning clerkships and placement locations separately
The scenario: The Office of Education uses a track lottery to place students into their clerkship order for the year. Then, a program coordinator manually compares student requests with staffing requirements in order to find the final placement for a specific clinical site. The program coordinator must repeat this same task again and again throughout the year.
How to avoid this: The Office of Education can run a randomized track lottery to place students into their assigned locations before the academic year starts. Then, the finalized location information can be shared with individual clerkships. This will save valuable administration time and prevent many headaches for program coordinators.
Mistake #5: Overly flexible schedules (that create unnecessary work for administrators!)
The scenario: A school allows students to rank their rotation preferences to create personalized schedules. Rotations have varying block lengths as well as holiday breaks or blackout periods. These irregularities make planning extra difficult.
In the example below, Track 2 shows a student who ended up with two 2-week blocks of “open” time slots in her schedule. Since there aren’t any rotations that are 2 weeks long, these open blocks cannot be filled, which means an administrator must manually adjust her schedule in order to complete it.
In Track 3, Neuro is a 4-week rotation that cannot be split up by a break. Because of the varying rotation lengths, a 2-week “open” period falls on both sides of the Winter Recess. As a result, Neuro cannot be scheduled into this track since it needs to take place over 4 consecutive weeks. Here again, manual administrator work is required to tweak the schedule to make everything fit.
Before – rotations that require manual adjustments to fix the red blocks:
How to avoid this: Use a track lottery process and create pre-determined rotations for your students to rank. This way, each student is guaranteed to have a complete schedule and you can avoid struggling with any availability limitations that may be caused by holiday breaks or blackout periods.
After – three tracks of complete rotations:
I hope these tips come in handy as you are thinking about the best way to set up your program’s rotation lottery. Please get in touch with us if you’d like some one-on-one help with your rotation scheduling process. Also, check out our scheduling and lottery pages for more details on how these tools work.