Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Allocation Of Public Resources: Bringing Order To Chaos, Lance Clifner

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Science Olympiad (SO) is a team-based academic competition involving multiple subject areas (Events) with arcane rules governing the team composition. Add to the mix parental contention over which student(s) get on the “All-Star” team, and you have a potentially explosive situation. This project brings order and logic to school-based SO programs and defuses tense milestones through the implementation of an institutional structure that: assigns students to Events based on solicited student preferences for the Events, collects objective student performance data, composes competitive teams based on student performance (aka “Moneyball”), and brings transparency to the Team Selection process through crowdsourcing. The …