Parents and students have to attend numerous (virtual or in pre-COVID times in-person) open houses, learn about the course offerings of the different schools, understand the schools’ admission priorities, figure out if the school requires additional admission material (auditions, essays), for at least 12 schools, likely more, to build their list of 12 choices.
Researching schools is time- and resource-consuming.Knowing your lottery number is helpful for several reasons: Recent changes in admissions have made lottery numbers the primary factor for admissions to MS and most HS. The truth is, the matching process is not completely strategy-proof: while your best strategy is always to order the 12 schools in your list in your true order of preference, there is some strategizing when it comes to deciding which schools to include in your list of 12 choices. This is the most common question: if the matching algorithm is strategy-proof, as the DOE says, and as I explained in my videos, then why does it matter to know your student’s lottery number: just list the schools in which you are interested in your true order of preference. Why is it useful to know my student’s lottery number? I encourage you to discuss your application with your guidance counselor to identify the best strategy for your student. I will also provide more results from last year’s crowdsourcing experiment.īefore I proceed, I want to note that I am not affiliated with the NYC DOE and that the following is based on my understanding of the process and on data provided by parents. In this post, I will try to answer some questions I have received from parents on the lottery process and share information that has come to light since my last post. In addition, after requiring parents to jump through hoops to access their child’s lottery number via Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, a campaign by a parent advocacy group, and resolutions from several elected parent councils, the DOE finally relented and as of mid-February 2022 has included students’ random lottery numbers in the MySchools application portal (in the student’s profile). Since then there have been several changes to the admission process, which impact the odds of admission.
ISCHOOL NYC HOW TO
Last Spring I wrote a post to explain the NYC school matching algorithm and how to interpret the lottery numbers that the NYC Department of Education uses to assign students to schools I also provided preliminary results from a crowdsourcing experiment to understand the odds of admission at various schools. This follow-up post gives more details on how to use that information when applying to schools.***
” If you want to learn about how students are matched to schools, and how to understand the long hexadecimal random numbers that the NYC DOE assigns to students, you should start by reading the first post.
***This is a follow-up post to “ Decoding the NYC School Admission Lottery Numbers. Results for the 2022 admission cycle are published here*** Please fill the survey if you applied to HS or MS this year. Crowdsourcing surveys for the 2022 admission cycle are available: HS Survey, MS Survey. Gaining Insights from the NYC School Admission Lottery Numbers