Course bidding announcement

BBA2s should have recently received an email from Academic Services (specifically, Evonne Plantinga) announcing the new course bidding process that is going to be used for the Winter semester. Course bidding allows BBA2 students to inform the system about which courses that are offered by the Ross School are most important to him/her. This is new. BBAs have never done this before. BBAs don't know how it works. Every single BBA2 should (must!) go to a workshop that Academic Services will be putting on in order to learn about the process. These workshops will be on both Friday, October 29th (1-2 PM in D1270) and Tuesday, November 2nd (4-5 PM in D1270).

Here's a portion of the text of the email announcement:

Course bidding is an internal Business School utility much like on-campus interview bidding. Students are allotted bid points (1000) and given a window of time to bid (Wednesday, November 3rd at 10 am, through Wednesday, November 10th at 10 am). After the close of bidding on November 10th, the system will compile the highest bids, regardless of the time they were entered, and generate course rosters and waitlists accordingly. We will then forward the results to the Registrar and preload you into the electives for which you successfully bid, along with your assigned section of CSIB 390 (which you will not have to bid for). This means that when your registration appointment time arrives, some classes will already be in your schedule, because you went through course bidding!

In preparation for course bidding we recommend that you begin to review the Winter term course offerings through Wolverine Access or the Registrar and start to plan which courses you would like to take next term. Also, be sure to check out "BBA News" on your iMpact log in page for updates or news related to this. Updated course bidding web pages will be posted shortly!

So, what does this mean? This means that, relative to the Ross School courses that you want to take, it does not matter what time your registration appointment is. What matters for these courses is the number of points the students bid on the course. Here are some possible scenarios:

• Students might bid all 1000 points on a course that they want to get, sacrificing the chance to bid for any other Ross School course.
• Students might bid all 1000 points and still not get in a course because more than the enrollment limit bid the maximum number of points on the course. At that point, names are selected randomly to break the tie.
• Students might bid 1 point on a course and still get in because fewer than the enrollment limit for a course bid on it.
• Students might not bid on a Ross School course at all, but still end up getting in when they go through the registration process, because fewer students than the enrollment limit bid on the course and the course did not already fill up with people who had earlier registration times.

The above are all the "edge" cases. The standard case is that more students than the enrollment limit bid on a course. The bids are ranked from high to low. The students with the highest bids get in the course. We think that this is a better outcome than the former system: students who lucked in to earlier registration times had better odds of getting into the courses they wanted.

After the process is over, we will be sure to run a survey to find out how the process went and what might be improved. Check back here for an announcement.

Given that this whole process is new, if a BBA2 is going to take any business school courses other than the CSIB core course, then he or she needs to go to one of these workshops.