An Evolutionary Algorithm for Assigning Students to Courses

In this paper we describe an evolutionary algorithm for assigning students to courses in a situation where each student specifies a set of courses in order of preference, each course has a limited enrollment, and the object is to maximize the overall student satisfaction by assigning each student to a course as high on his or her preference list as possible. Results of using the algorithm on historical data are compared to the success of a human in making the assignments. This work was done as part of a summer undergraduate research project while the second author was still a student. We also report preliminary results for using this problem as the basis for an assignment in a course in Artificial Intelligence.