The Sorting Hat feature enables you to easily sort applicants into form or tutor groups, balancing them by a range of factors which you can control.
“The Sorting Hat”
One of the tasks that schools have to do with new year groups is to decide which tutor group (also known as ‘registration groups’), you wish to place your students into.
Our Sorting Hat feature is useful especially if you need to “balance” more than one factor (such as ethnicity, gender, previous school, etc.) and it can also factor in students who need to be placed together, or definitely need to be in different groups to one another.
The ‘wizard’ will ask you a few questions to help it get started…
- For the time being, you can only create ‘tutor groups (reg groups)’, but soon you’ll also be able to place students into ‘houses’ and other ‘user-defined groups’ you set up in your MIS.
- On the next screen, the wizard will show you a list of the tutor groups in your MIS. You can filter this list by MIS, and if you don’t see the groups you want, you can add them yourself, or edit the names from your MIS.
On the next screen, you will be asked to decide which factors you wish to “balance” your groups by. We know that the most common factor that schools like to balance is “gender”, so that a relatively even number of boys and girls are in each group, so this is the first factor you’ll see in this list.
Most schools also like to ensure that students from different ethnic groups are spread evenly throughout their groups, so this factor is also listed.
You have the option of adding additional factors, such as a students’ ‘current school’ if you want, or indeed, you can decide to use one of the questions from your application form as well, by clicking on the ‘New Criteria’ button.
Notes:
- Only questions within your application form which are configured as "dropdown single select" field types can be used as criteria within the sorting hat.
- Only questions which have an answer for every child can be used as criteria within the sorting hat - if a field in your form was set to non-compulsory, meaning some applicants have not answered that question, it cannot be used as a sorting field within this feature.
Once you have the criteria you wish to balance, you should then “drag and drop” the factors to arrange them in the order that is most important to you. For example, if it is MOST important for gender to be balanced, then drag it to the top of the list.
A note about “ethnicity”:
Our feature doesn’t understand the complex (and often controversial!) concept that is “ethnicity”, and if your MIS is set up to have very specific categories for ethnicity, our system won’t be able to tell that one category is a “sub-category” of another one, and groups that the system think are ‘balanced’ might not look balanced to you.
For example, let’s say that a fleet of alien spaceships lands in your town and you decide to categorise the ethnicity of your four alien students who have joined your school as: “Alien – Triffid”, “Alien – Dalek”, “Alien – Cybermen” and “Alien – Martians”. With this very specific way of recording ethnicities, our feature wouldn’t understand that they were all ‘aliens” and might distribute them so that all four were in the same tutor group, but you might not be happy that they were all in the same group. To fix this, you might want to ‘edit’ the ethnicities of your students before you run the feature, so they all just said, “Alien”, and this way the feature would evenly distribute these between your groups.
We will soon be adding a feature to allow you to “merge” specific ethnic categories into “broader” ones for the purposes of balancing groups, but for the time being, you may just wish to edit the ethnicities if this is an issue for your school.
As you move through the wizard, the system will then ask you which students need to be kept together (the "pair with" column) and which students need to be kept apart (the "avoid") column.
Once you have populated this information, you can click Allocate Students to calculate the groups and the wizard will work out the best fit for you, based on the factors you have asked it to consider.
You can also click 'View totals' to see an overview of your figures and splits.
Once this process is complete, you can manually override and move students to different groups if needed, or rerun the wizard if you wish.