Re: Randomizing records in a file

From: John Yeung
Sorry if I'm being perverse or nosy, but why do you need this?

I have no idea why Albert may need to randomize his data. But we have a couple use cases.

We support charter schools which often have more requests for student admissions than available seats. Unfortunately some students cannot be admitted, simply due to lack of space. Since the state is funding the school, they require that applicants be admitted via "lottery". Generating random values and linking them to applicants is a good way to ensure that each applicant is given an equal chance of being admitted. Running a lottery is a simple matter of ordering the applicant list by random value, and selecting the applicants from the top of the list.In my case I

Similar to school admissions, we have an automated process for generating student schedules, where student course requests are processed in random order so that if there are more course requests than available seats, it makes the process fair for all students.

-Nathan.

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