Prioritising the students' Choices in Options

Question:
In our school we want to:
1. Prioritise the Choices the students make (1-4 etc), not treating all the Choices as all equal.
2. We need to be able to list subjects, but not have the software assume they will definitely run.

Answer:
Yes, what you describe is a very common way of working … decisions over whether to run certain groups (“Is this subject viable this year ?”) are made each year by all our schools.

One way forward:
Enter your students’ Choices in their favourite order [either manually, or from an Excel file, or via the free on-line TOOLS package]. ie. do not worry about priority at this stage.
Then Options will then try to satisfy every Choice for every student, if possible.  
Options will show you (by default) four possible patterns, and you can work on them using various tools and features, such as “Improve”.   If it is not possible to satisfy every student, then you have choices to make, as described below:

For each Subject, you can enter the “min” and “max” group sizes that you would typically find acceptable for a group in that Subject.
So for Latin (say), you may have said the minimum size is 5 students.  Options will warn you if a Latin group in your pattern has fewer than 5 students.  [You can also see this information on the Clash Table Screen.]
You then have a decision to make; whether to run the group or not.  In most schools, this will depend on a variety of factors, including:

1. How good those particular students are at Latin (this requires discussion with the Latin teacher).
2. Whether they need Latin to further their careers, or just chose it as a hobby/interest (this requires talking to those students, or their parents).
3. What your Latin teacher’s workload is elsewhere in the school.
4. Whether Latin was their first choice, or their last choice.
5. Whether those students are sure to come back next year, with a good attendance record, or may be leaving the school anyway?
6. How viable is the group economically, depending on budget cuts etc?
7. etc.

If you decide not to run this Latin group, then again you have a choice:

1. There may be another group of the same subject, that the student may be able to attend by changing subject choices slightly?  
   To help them make a new choice, Options has a special “Review & Counsel” Screen that shows what other subjects they could choose instead of Latin to fit into your Options Pattern.  You can drag-and-drop them to their new choices.
     
2. The Latin teacher may perhaps offer to teach the keenest students in his lunch-hour or after school [with a reduced teaching load elsewhere to compensate], so Latin does not need to be timetabled but those students are still catered for.
     
3. You may simply not offer Latin this year, and counsel the students involved to make a new choice.  To help them make a new choice, use the “Review & Counsel” Screen, as above.
      
4. You may (optionally) have asked your students for a “Reserve” choice, in which case you can ask Options to see what difference using this Reserve choice would make to the Options Pattern / student satisfaction.  There are 2 articles in the KnowledgeBase about this, see: Using Reserve Choices 

 Note: For other ways of doing this, see also the article at: Prioritise Choice Order