Student Elective Allocation Tool

SEAT gets course details from workflow. Departments send these details (course capacities, ranking criteria, etc) to workflow through the slotbook every semester.

For the purposes of SEAT, a course has two types of information:

1. Permanent Information: This includes the course description, references, prerequisites etc. All this information is present in the Course Master. Modifying this information is done via approval through BAC and Senate.
2. Information pertaining to the particular offering of the course: This includes the following : is this course available for SEAT, course capacity for SEAT, Outside Capacity for SEAT, ranking criteria. These parameters are specific to the offering of the course and can change across offerings. All this information is uploaded to slotbook during slot-wise listing.

Both the pieces of information are crucial for SEAT. It is possible that for some courses the Permanent Information is not up to date. We encourage departments to get this information in place for the benefit of the students. However since changing “Permanent Information” requires approvals, workflow has enabled a short-cut to updating course description and prerequisites for the current offering of the course. It should be noted that prerequisites entered using this shortcut will not be enforced, and are only for the students’ information.

During slotbook update, departments provide the following details for each course.

1. Is this course available for 2015 batch and later students as an elective course? (In case you choose to tick this, then please ensure that the prerequisites for the course are correctly entered in course master.)
2. Total Capacity (how many students should SEAT allot to the course?)
3. Outside Capacity (how many students from outside parent dept. should SEAT allot to the course?)
4. Ranking Criteria (what ranking criteria should be used if there are more students interested that the available capacity?

The Total Capacity denotes the maximum number of students that SEAT will allot to the course. Note that only 2015 batch and later BTech / DD students fall under the purview of SEAT -- we call such students as under the purview of SEAT students. A course may also be credited by BTech/ DD students from 2014 and earlier batches and postgraduate students (MTech, MS, PhD). We call such students as outside the purview of SEAT students. Note that outside the purview of SEAT students are not accounted for in Total Capacity. Therefore, the Total Capacity should NOT be confused with Class Size (which is used for room allocation etc).
The Outside Capacity denotes the number of external (outside department) students that SEAT can allocate to a course. For example, suppose a course CS2800 from the CSE department is available for outside department students and can accommodate 10 students from outside CSE. In this case the Outside Capacity for CS2800 is 10. Again, these 10 students are only from 2015 and later batches.
Note that the Total Capacity includes Outside Capacity and Within Department Capacity, but does not include students who fall outside SEAT purview (BTech/ DD 2014 and earlier and All MTech, MS, and PhD).

We request departments to take a call based on historical data. Going forward, as a larger set of students fall under the purview of SEAT, we expect that the estimation will become easier.

Once the slotbook is approved by the TTC Chair, individual faculty members can provide data pertaining to courses that they will be offering in the upcoming semester. They can fill these details by logging into workflow and navigating to Academics → Course Details; a sample screenshot is provided below. In this screen, individual course instructors can provide the following inputs. The instructor can provide a brief description of the course (Proposed content) and the background knowledge expected (Prerequisite). Note that this information on background knowledge is only for students to read manually. At this stage SEAT cannot use this information to validate whether students have the necessary prerequisites.

With this new system in place, COT will change its form -- instead of students going around with paper forms, the COT is specified by the teacher indirectly. At the time of filling the slot-book, course instructors will provide course capacity and ranking criteria. Thus, instructors can control the number of students allocated to the course as well as the ranking criteria. Departments are requested to update the course master with appropriate prerequisites and course equivalences for all their courses through appropriate channels (via BAC, Senate etc). SEAT has essentially automated the manual task of instructors inspecting the student’s eligibility for the course and the task of selecting students from the pool of interested students.

Please refer to a similar question in Student FAQ section, for a detailed description of various ranking criteria. We expect the departments to provide us with ranking criteria for courses offered in each semester. The default is set to Stratified Random.

Please refer to similar question in Student FAQ section.

SEAT uses workflow to get its input from students. Every student who wishes to credit electives in a particular semester, should submit the following:

1. The maximum number of credits (including both elective and core credits, default is 63) he/she wants to register for in the particular semester, and
2. An exhaustive list of courses with preference order.
3. Each course must have a color code. Only one course from every color group will be allotted to the student.

Workflow shows you all the courses that are being offered across different departments that are available as electives. It is highly recommended that you ensure that you have the background knowledge (prerequisites) to credit the course. You can do this by checking the course details on the academic website, visiting the course home page and/or talking to the faculty offering the course.

Once you have ensured that you meet the prerequisites for a set of courses, create a single list containing all the courses that you wish to give a preference for. Your preference list can contain multiple courses in the same slot. The SEAT software will ensure that you do not have any slot conflicts. Next, you have to color code the courses in your preference list.Only one course from each color group will be allotted. “No color code (0) ” is default option. Course with “No color code (black color)” will be treated as individual sets.

Students may have a subset of courses in their preference list from which they wish to pick only one. In that case, all the courses in a subset MUST have same color code. There is no restriction on the number of courses that can be grouped under one colour.
For example, a student may have several courses from the Maths department in his preference list, but wants to be allotted at most one of them. He should colour all those courses in the same colour.
If you do not wish to give a course any colour, choose the “no colour” option . “No colour” option indicates that courses under that group are uncoloured, ie, any number of courses can be allotted from the set of courses with “no colour”.
It should be noted that there is no need to colour courses in the same slot with a single colour. The SEAT software takes care of slot conflicts.

There is no more paper COT for students starting from 2015-16 batch. COT has been replaced with course prerequisites and course capacities declared for SEAT.

Every course has a ranking criteria associated with it. Types of ranking criteria currently available in SEAT are:

1. Stratified Random: The course with stratified random as their ranking criteria will prioritize all students who gave this course as a top-choice over any student who gave it as a second choice, and so on. Amongst all students who gave the course as a top choice, a random order of ranking is used.
2. Random: The course with random as the ranking criteria will order all students interested in the course in a random order.
3. CGPA: The course with CGPA as their ranking criteria will compare students based on their CGPA till last semester. Students with higher CGPA will be given more preference over students with lower CGPA.

Consider the following example: say there are 5 students S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 who have listed course C in their preference list according to the table below:

	S1	S2	S3	S4	S5
Position of C in student preference order	1	1	1	2	2
CGPA of student	7	9.2	8.5	8.5	6

Under stratified random​ criterion, the first three students S1, S2, and S3 will be randomly permuted amongst themselves followed by a random permutation of the last two (i.e., S4 and S5). For example, S2, S1, S3, S5, S4 is a possible stratified random ordering, but S2, S3, S4, S1, S5 is not.
Under random ​criterion, one of the 5! permutations of the five students will be chosen uniformly at random.
Under CGPA​ criterion, one of (S2, S3, S4, S1, S5) and (S2, S4, S3, S1, S5) will be chosen uniformly at random. (In other words, ties are broken randomly.) It should be noted that the ranking order is an expression of instructors preference over students interested in the course. Since student preferences are also taken into consideration by SEAT, the top k students ranked by the course (where k is the capacity of the course) may not be allocated to the course.

Pre-requisites are used to decide if a student is eligible for a given course. Ranking criteria on the other hand, like ‘CGPA’ or ‘Random’ as discussed above, are used to rank the eligible students for allotment in the presence of limitations such as course capacities.

A student will provide his maximum credit limit (including core course credits). This maximum credit limit cannot exceed 63. The student will not be allotted more credits than the maximum credit limit, but it is possible that his credit limit will not be met if the student does not provide a long enough preference list or makes a mistake (like colouring all his courses with the same colour). In this case, the student is advised to apply for courses in the 2nd round. Hence a student should make his preference list sufficiently long.
A student must responsibly choose the colours for courses in their preference list. If he or she makes a mistake like putting all courses in a single colour, or putting all HS courses in different colours, it will not be considered as an error, since it is a valid input.
“No colour” option indicates that courses under that group are uncoloured, ie, any number of courses can be allotted from the set of courses with “no colour”.

The best way to avoid dissatisfaction is to do a thorough homework of the available courses and provide a well thought out and sufficiently long ordering of courses.
If the student is not satisfied with the electives allocated to him/her, one can opt for dropping/replacing the course(s). The drop option is similar to the traditional drop, the student simply deregisters for the allocated elective and accepts that he/she does not want any other elective. The replace option is a 2-step process -- the first step is to drop the course. In the next step, the student can provide a fresh list of preferences, however only on the courses which have vacancies after the first round of allotment. Note that student is not guaranteed to get allotted to a course in the replace and might remain unallotted.