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There is discussion of these partial lotteries in academia as a way to improve the procedure of getting grant money. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/arti

• 2sk21 6y ago
  Malcom Gladwell touched upon this in a recent episode of his podcast http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revolution http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...
• pattusk 6y ago
  This is generally known as sortition and was common in the ancient world. I've always felt it modern democratic politics would benefit greatly from such a system. I'm not sure the same is true of academia, you want students good enough that they do not risk failing at an elite institution, but when setting the threshold for "good enough" it's easy to reproduce the same inequalities you were trying to avoid in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
  • slaymaker1907 6y ago
    I think the point is that the underlying metrics have a degree of randomness which we need to recognize. Instead of just deciding what is good enough to make it at Harvard and have that be the cutoff, you could certainly set the cutoff higher but still have randomness after that point. Don’t introduce arbitrary sorting when that is really not possible. I TA’d a class where we used a grading metric sort of like this. It turns out that it is a lot easier to grade assignments by grouping them into 5 buckets than it is to give an extremely precise point value to everything.