Inactive Lotteries and Deleting Lotteries

Learn the difference between making a lottery inactive v. deleting a lottery.

What's included in this article?

• What is an Inactive lottery?
• What is a Deleted lottery?
• When should a lottery run be deleted?
• When should a lottery run never be deleted?

What is an Inactive lottery?

An inactive lottery is one that is no longer the most recently run pool. 

For example, if you run multiple lotteries in order to add new applicants to the lottery list, each time you run the lottery, the prior run is considered "inactive". Inactive lottery runs can be viewed on the lottery dashboard by selecting the “Show Inactive” checkbox on the lottery dashboard.

The image below shows the inactive lottery in red (pool 1) for Orion Elementary School. The active lottery (pool 2 = most recent lottery run) for Orion is at the top of the list.

 

What is a Deleted lottery?

Using the delete icon will remove a lottery pool from the system. Only active lottery pools may be deleted. When an active lottery run is deleted, the lottery list reverts back to the most recently run pool. A modal will be displayed for you to review and confirm the impacts of deleting a lottery:

• lottery placements (offered and waitlisted ranks) are removed from applications
• applications that were included in the deleted lottery will no longer be placed, but may be run in subsequent lotteries
• deleted lotteries are not able to be restored

If ALL lottery pools must be deleted, each must be deleted individually. 

• Note: The action of deleting a lottery from the system may take a few minutes. Refreshing the lottery dashboard will reload lottery lists that have become active again.

When should a lottery run be deleted?

Lottery runs should only be deleted if the results are inaccurate and do not place students according to the lottery design, cutoff numbers, settings, etc. OR during testing in sandbox.

Deleting a lottery run should only be considered in a NON-production (test) environment or if lottery results have not been published and communicated in a production environment. 

When should a lottery run never be deleted?

A lottery run should NEVER be deleted if it’s been published and results have already been provided to guardians. Deleting a lottery run removes student lottery placements from the system and allows the application to be placed in a new lottery run. 

In general, revoking a lottery list placement is NOT recommended or encouraged, but this is especially true of published offered list placements.

Note: if a lottery run is deleted, and auto-decline settings across programs are being used, we recommend that ALL lotteries for ALL programs should also be deleted.