Weight student lottery by acceptance in previous lotteries

[willgearty]

We've gotten a lot of requests from students and parents that the lottery should give preference to people who have applied to previous lotteries but were not selected (particularly people who have been rejected from a number of previous lotteries). When @enze-chen and I implemented the student lottery, we were adamant that we did not want this and that each lottery should be separate, and that lottery tickets should have an equal chance of being selected (within the grade capacity constraints of the program). However, I've slowly been convinced that maybe this would be something that could be useful. Ultimately, if this is implemented, I think it should be an option in the manage page (that is off by default). There are a few other points I think are important to think about for the implementation:

• There should be a way to identify which programs are used for determining weights (I could imagine you would only want to determine the weights based on similar type programs; Splashes for a Splash lottery, Sprouts for a Sprout lottery, etc.)
• How much is a formerly rejected student weighted over another student? Perhaps this should be an option in the manage page.
• Should a formerly accepted student be weighted less than a new student? Also perhaps an option in the manage page.
• Should weights stack? If a student has been rejected multiple times, should they have a higher weight? What if a student has always been accepted?
• How should the weight of a lottery group be calculated? The average of the individuals? The maximum? The minimum? Maybe another option in the manage form?

And just gonna put this here for later: weighted sort in python

[hwatheod]

Just one thought on this:

Depending on how this is implemented, you might end up with the effect that a student who enters the lottery for the first time in, say, 11th grade would have a very low chance of getting selected because there are too many other 11th graders who were rejected during 9th and 10th grade who have priority.

[willgearty]

I think there are just way too many different permutations of how to do a custom lottery, so I'm going to say this is fixed by https://github.com/learning-unlimited/ESP-Website/pull/2963.