Welcome to PASS

(Preferential Admission Selection Software)

Preferential Balloting for Academic School Course Selection

Todays world is about providing the best possible choices at the best cost. If you satify your student requests and can completely fill your courses then your institution will be on time on budget. The PASS Software can eleminate you having courses half or one third full that is very costly. Our PASS software package is an affordable and excellent alternative to traditional practice of first come first serve course selection method. The first student gets all his courses and the last student goes away unsatisfied. Our newest feature lets you turn On/Off courses to get the most profitable class size. Our software is the first preferential course & student modeling software in existance.

This process gives students a fair way of getting a selection of courses that they need for their academic studies. The student simply fills out a queue card with a list of courses they would like in order of preference. Each student is considered one at a time providing them with one course selection (if possible) per group iteration/count). Gone is the day, where the person that camped out the longest at the Admissions office will get all the courses they want and the person that is last in line gets none of the courses they want.

The Preferential Admission Selection Software was developed originally for Queens University at the request of the Political Science department. I was asked to create a program using a preferential selection process that allows students to select courses. Since, I wrote the Preferential Ballot Counting Software for the Reform/National Alliance Party of Canada, they felt I would be qualified in creating this new software package.

In the PASS process, if a student is first in the queue then he will get his first preference filled before processing the rest of the students sequentially. When the software hits the last person in the list it starts on the second count from the last person and processes students down the list to the 1st student in the queue. The PASS program lets the student select the number of courses for up to 4 semesters and 20 course preferences. Course conflicts are take into consideration for courses that are already selected from previous counts. A conflict can come about as a result of a timeslot-scheduling problem or because a student has selected a course that is the same in different semesters. Currently the PASS program allows 5 conflicts per course.

The PASS program has a number of handy data management options that allows the department to setup a set of preferred students in and run them against a set of courses. Then copy the results to a new run with a 2nd set of students and so on. This makes it very easy to run MAJORS against a full set of course vacancies available and a set of MEDIALS run against the remaining course vacancies.