hey chicago schoolers

if upon graduation from jc, you were to give modular credits to everyone and asked them to bid for university courses, there wouldn't be any surprise if everybody dumped everything onto the course of their choice. after all, you can't take 2 courses at once, and even if allocating points to give you favour for your second choice were allowed, it probably would not be game-theoretically efficient to put anything for your second choice. so clearly, you can't have an allocation market with everyone having equal modular credits. in these scenarios, academic course are rationed based on grades (which are your "hard work" or incentive points, and also serve an additional benefit of signalling your academic aptitude and willingness to work). in addition there are interviews etc to generally determine your level of passion. it is, in general, what people see as a fair way to allocate, or at least the fairest of all unfair alternatives.

now i'm pretty interested in the modular credit market. the knowledge that some people are willing to put all their points into one course signals either (a. poor allocation of resources, or b. that there are certain bottleneck courses which people feel they cannot do without, e.g. clinical psych) b. implies that having these bottleneck courses is clearly much more highly valued than any possible combination of courses, such that given the limited MCs you have, there is no combination of courses you could have which would dominate you taking that one course. why might this be the case?

the reason MCs don't work as well as you would like them to do is because at the end of the day, it is not a market integrated into the real world. Let me give you an example. You are playing Second Life, or some MMORPG. The god of this virtual world decides to dispense 100 second life credits to everyone, with which anyone can use to bid for certain virtual goods, like virtual pie, virtual hamburger. the price of virtual goods will be determined by the total money supply and the relative tastes of the virtual citizens. and let us not kid ourselves, if red is a nice colour online, then red virtual clothes would probably cost more. so the virtual money system works well in allocating virtual resources (assuming of course server space is limited and that is why we have to ration item tags).

now a parallel market exists in which there is a demand for virtual pie in the real world, such that one is able to find people willing to give you 10 REAL dollars for a virtual pie. But for some reason, no one wants any of the other virtual goods. Then I would put all my virtual credits into virtual pie of course! Unless my taste for having virtual hamburger is 10 real dollars. The key is the mismatch between the free modular credits and the very tangible and very large real value of taking a bottleneck course. You see if one had to work for virtual money, then eventually the labour time involved on second life to earn the money to get (maybe you have to do 10 quests say, taking 1 hour), would equalize with the 10 real dollars. So you've traded your online labour for 10 bucks. But what the fuck do you trade when you have modular credits. there is no price you could make which would clear the market, because the real value of MCs is close to zero (maybe not if you allow borrowing from other years, or the other more insidious one, trading MCs for money/sex). If you gave everyone 10,000 MCs it wouldn't matter. it's like printing money.

So perhaps you could consider identifying bottleneck courses and selecting them the same way you would students for medicine. through some objective criteria you have to work for (and thus have some labour cost). but this would perpetuate inequality in education (people who by luck do better in one year will have everything going for them). in a modular system though i would say one could try again and take the module in another year.

expand the bottleneck course. probably the best idea. this cost resources, so it's like giving student's a free lunch, then you could charge. but this is also perceived as unfair. but you needn't have had an MC system to determine this. if the course is oversubscribed, fill it. but maybe the way to go is really to get rid of all the crap courses nobody wants and fire those professors. but what if someone wants to take latin next time?

of course, this is based on my limited understanding of MCs. I need to go read up more.