Impacts of Manually Adjusting an Application's Placement on the Waiting List

Learn how Enroll handles manually moved applications on the waiting list

In the event that a student's application needs to be moved up or down the waiting list, Enroll gives you the option to manually adjust a student's waiting list placement. The `Adjust Placement` option for an application is located within the 3-dot Actions menu next to each application on the lottery list.

Before making a manual adjustment, it is important to understand the interplay and impacts of a manual movement v. the automated system logic that may be enabled to manage your waiting list.

Impacts of Manually Moving an Application on the Waiting List

When an application’s placement on the waiting list is changed manually by an admin, this action overrides the lottery logic for the application moving forward. This means that the manual adjustment locks in the application’s order on the lottery list. The waitlist number is not locked for this application, but moving forward the system will now ignore the lottery logic for the manually adjusted application.

Note:

• A manually moved application will still move up the waitlist if others above it withdraw, accept, or decline a seat.
• A manually moved application will still be auto-rolled up to the offered list (if setting is enabled) if it is the next available application and a seat becomes available.

Manual Waiting List Movements and Post Lottery Settings

Two lottery settings that are commonly used to manage post-lottery behavior that are impacted when manually moving an application:

1. Auto-add eligible applications to lottery list after initial lottery is run (set at the Global or Program level). 

• When a post-lottery application is auto-added to the waiting list (once it is marked as eligible), the system looks at the lottery logic of each application to determine where the post-lottery application should be placed relative to other applications on the lottery list.
• The manually placed application will be ignored during that comparison of lottery logic since the application is no longer considered to be placed via the system’s lottery logic.
  • Example: A lottery is run with a sort method of "Date Submitted Within Priority Groups"
    • Application G is manually moved to another position on the waiting list
    • Post lottery, Application M is auto-added to the waiting list, and will be placed in the corresponding sub-lottery according to date/time stamp
    • The system will not consider the date/time of Application G (essentially ignoring it) when looking to place Application M in date/time order.

 - and - 

2. Always Keep Lottery Lists Grouped by Lottery Design (set by your SchoolMint staff)

• If an application on the waiting list is manually moved, and then a priority (or score) is changed, one would expect the priority/score change to trigger the application to be moved into the new, corresponding sub-lottery; however, the manually moved application in this scenario would not move up or down the lottery list into the new, corresponding sub-lottery because it has been previously moved via a manual `Adjust Placement` action.
• In order to move the application into the corresponding sub-lottery that matches the updated  priority (or score), the admin would need to make another manual `Adjust Placement` move because the lottery logic is no longer being considered in the automated process of keeping applications grouped by lottery design.

Best Practice

We understand that situations may arise that require a manual movement of a student's application on the waiting list (correcting erroneous data that determined placement). To help identify manually moved applications, we recommend adding the column `lottery_rankings.manual_indicator` to a Saved View of your lottery list.

• 1 = Application has been manually moved
• 0 = Application has NOT been manually moved