I got a very irate email from an otherwise very nice-sounding Bernal Heights mom and statistician who, based on the anecdotal evidence of the people she knows, is sure that including siblings in the “80 percent got one of their choices” figure is massively misleading (she suggests that 70% of non-siblings went unassigned). Well, there is a sibling effect, but yet again I must point out that it is not as huge as people think, and nowhere near enough to cause 70% of non-siblings to be shut out of their choices entirely.
I’m focusing this discussion on Kindergarten because most of the anger I’m hearing is from parents of incoming Kindergarteners who went 0/7 (there are 935 of them, to be exact, and most of them are posting over on the SFKFiles blog). Here are the stats:
- The district received 4,694 total applications for Kindergarten. Of those, 1,228 (26%) were younger siblings of students currently enrolled at the school listed first by the applicant (the sibling preference only kicks in if you list the older sibling’s school FIRST on your application, so therefore the sibling effect is most pronounced on first choice statistics). In other words, 3,466 first-time applicants applied for seats in Kindergarten. This is the new “base” number for all the percentages that appear below.
- In all, 2,930 applicants (siblings AND non-siblings) received their first choice. Because sibling preference only applies to first choices, all siblings were assigned to their first choices, leaving 1,702 first-time applicants who received their first choices. This represents 49% of all non-sibling applications (1702/3466 *100 = 49%).
- The percentage of first-time applicants receiving their second through seventh choices were (respectively, with rounding): 10%, 5%, 3%, 2%, 2% and 1%. Therefore, 73% of all non-sibling applicants received A choice.
- The remaining 27% of non-sibling applicants received no choices.
Rachel Norton 
Hi Mom2Three:
% of K applicants in each category for zip code 94127 – There were 145 total applicants from 94127 for K. Of those:
59 or 40.7% got their first choice
14 or 9.7% got their second choice
4 or 2.8% got their third choice
4 or 2.8% got their fourth choice
1 or 0.7% got their fifth choice
1 or 0.7% got their sixth choice
1 or 0.7% got their seventh choice
84 or 57.9% got A choice —
61 or 42.1% got NO choice.
Rachel, would you mind posting the info for zip code 94127? Sorry to beat a dead horse and I know it’s changing next year. I like data too. THX
Sure thing, soon-to-be-SF refugee (hopefully not too soon!):
% of K applicants in each category for zip code 94107 – There were 108 total applicants from 94107 for K. Of those:
58 or 53.7% got their first choice
6 or 5.6% got their second choice
4 or 3.7% got their third choice
1 or 0.9% got their fourth choice
3 or 2.8% got their fifth choice
2 or 1.9% got their sixth choice
3 or 2.8% got their seventh choice
77 or 71.3% got A choice —
31 or 28.7% got NO choice.
Hello,
Thank you for all the transparency, honesty, information. Could you please please please post the % of K applicants from 94107 in each category? Thank you one million percent.
Concerns I have with the new system are that it is slower to send signals of quality than the pseudo-market we have now.
E.g., Sunnyside gets on people’s radar because a bunch of parents get assigned there after going 0/7. It looks JS may do the same this year. Changes like those, or Miraloma and Alvarado before them, are going to be slower, at least in the case of GE programs.
I’d also be more generous than Rachel on the number of quality ES’s in the district. Using 2008 data:
– There are 33 schools with a similar-schools rank of 7 or better (out of 64 with similar schools rankings) . These schools are very good to excellent
– There are 12 schools with a similar schools rank of 3-6: these schools are good to middling
– And there are 19 schools with a similar schools rank of 1-2 (poor)
I visited 25 of the 65-70 SFUSD elementaries. mostly ones in the SE, and can confidently say I’d have sent my kid to any of them.
And even among those schools ranked 1-2, there are schools with attractive immersion of BBP programs (e.g. Revere, Flynn, BV, Webster, Marshall, Rosa Parks). So, if you asked me, there’s maybe . And some of those with a low “similar schools” index are trophy or near-trophy schools – Grattan, Diane Feinstein, Sunnyside have a similar schools index of only 1 or 2 – that doesn’t mean those schools are unattractive, just that they’re punching below their weight demographically.
The schools where I’d have a hard time sending my kid, based on their test scores and programs to are pretty small: Bret Harte, Bryant, Cesar Chavez, John Muir, Sanchez, Tenderloin Community. Not surprisingly, those are the schools for which being assigned to is freaking folks out the most.
“There is no grand conspiracy or malicious intent in the system”
Damn. I always wondered if working for An Evil Conspiracy had better pension & health benefits, and was hoping I could get the skinny from you Rachel. Do you know anyone connected with an Evil Conspiracy that we can get in contact with.
“I think really the issue is that the district talks about a families chances of getting one of their choices in terms of overall averages, and gives each family that sits down in the convention center the impression that they have roughly a 2/3s shot at getting one of their choices.”
It’s actually higher than 2/3s. 73% of non-sibs got one of their choices.
Rachel: thank you for having this blog, being open and responsive, and liking data. I want to make sure that amongst the irate you get points for those things.
I hope that when I look at schools next year, I feel the options and selection process will fill me with some faith that I can send my twins to a public school that will serve them well. I hope I find the negative data about JS and Revere doesn’t represent their quality, or I hope schools somehow balance out. I haven’t looked into it much yet, but when my fellow dads in Bernal feel as they do, it is hard to have faith.
Thanks for your follow up on this hot topic.
Fiid – perhaps you are right about their being some sort of undetected bug deep in the system (it is a highly complex algorithm with way too many variables to be completely predictable), but here’s how I tend to explain the anecdotal evidence that middle-class folks tend to feel more disappointed about their lottery outcomes:
1)The diversity index has a certain number of possible diversity profile combinations. The vast majority of those diversity profiles contain indicators of extreme poverty. For a middle-class family like yours or mine, there are really only two possible profiles: speaking another language at home or not. That used to be a big loophole that was used successfully by middle-class families to get a seat. We closed that loophole last year by instituting language testing for every applicant who claimed English as a second language. But the number of applicants in extreme poverty is relatively small, at least based on all the data I have seen (I don’t have an easily digestible statistic for you); and in addition our applicants in extreme poverty generally pick different schools than middle-class families do — at least to the extent the extremely low-income families participate at all. So the rest of us generally fit into just two diversity profiles and we are competing against each other — in very large numbers, I might add.
Which leads me to my second point:
2)Middle-class families are all choosing from a relatively small number of schools. The “old-timers” who went through the system when it started a decade ago will tell you that the original list of schools was very short: Rooftop, Lilienthal, Clarendon, Lakeshore, Alamo, Lawton and Alice Fong Yu. Now that list has expanded dramatically, and I think many middle-class folks who evaluated schools this year would be able to make a list of at least 25 schools they would have accepted. But we have 73 elementary schools — many of which received request numbers in the single digits. We’re simply not able to accommodate all of our middle-class applicants in the 25 schools they are choosing. Thus: many of those applicants go 0/7.
The good news is that the new system will not limit you to 7 choices and it will not penalize you for choosing fewer than 7. So hopefully the 0/7 problem will be a thing of the past. I am not so optimistic to think that magically everyone will be accommmodated in a school they like, but I do think there will be fewer really angry and disappointed people once the new system is implemented.
We’re a middle class family in Bernal Heights.
I think really the issue is that the district talks about a families chances of getting one of their choices in terms of overall averages, and gives each family that sits down in the convention center the impression that they have roughly a 2/3s shot at getting one of their choices.
The reality is that for involved parents that are trying to select reasonable schools that that number simply isn’t realistic. As I can observe in my peer group, our chances of getting a choice are more like 20%, assuming that there isn’t a bug in the lottery software or something more nefarious going on. I’m not a big believer in conspiracy theories, but some very smart people I know believe that the lottery results are crafted to create PTA involvement and cashflow at unpopular schools. As a software engineer; I think it more likely that the proprietary system that runs the lottery contains bugs that noone has the resources to identify or deal with.
In terms of weather JS and Paul Revere are totally amazing schools or not; that’s sort of interesting, because in a super-demand heavy environment, we, and I’m sure others, went out looking for schools exactly like this, where the only metrics that are available are OK and on the upswing.
It is all fashion and fad; perception is king, but I do ask; in a couple of tours, and hours of review of spreadsheets and date; how was I supposed to know that Junipero Serra is the next Miraloma? JS didn’t even publish an API score last year because of “irregularities”. We already have a significant number of hours invested in this process. How are parents realistically supposed to evaluate schools to make this choice?
You’re right that none of this helps, so realistically, we’ll be wait-pooling just like everyone else, and organizing so we can create a positive impact in our assigned school when we end up there.
Good luck implementing the new system. That will certainly be more fun than dealing with the old!
‘Tamara’ – I don’t have the sibling data broken down by zip code. I do have the number of siblings by school, but I don’t know what zip code the siblings live in. Anyway, you can make a reasonable estimate – district-wide 26% of the K applications came from younger siblings. At the 20 most-requested schools, 36% of the applicants were siblings, but the siblings represented a tiny fraction of total requests at each school (e.g. Rooftop: 26 siblings and 1,056 total requests; Clarendon: 17 siblings and 1,050 total requests; Lawton: 32 siblings and 839 total requests; West Portal: 13 siblings and 807 total requests; Lilienthal: 25 siblings and 786 total requests). So the sibling effect is especially pronounced at the high-demand schools, but you’d expect that to be the case.
Numbers are funny things, it’s all how you “spin” them. Spun your way, it doesn’t look so bad … (49% of all incoming non-sibling kinders got their first choice!)
Another way to look at it is this:
(Using the numbers you provided)
—> 42 % of all the Kinders who got their first choice were siblings.
It’s all how you say it, isn’t it?
Thankfully, this is the last time SFUSD uses this crazy system.
For the 94110 statistics you site, how many of those 323 “first choices” in 94110 were siblings?
<>
Brent wrote: “they all probably chose nearly identical sets of schools, and so did enough other families that they just didn’t get any choices. And that implies that the options near my neighborhood are not deep enough to satisfy the demand.”
Not sure I agree with you about the options in Bernal. Paul Revere is an AWESOME school, and not just the Spanish Immersion part. I tell people all the time that if I lived in Bernal, Paul Revere’s two strands would be among my top school choices — and I proudly say that even after it landed on the state’s ham-handed lowest 5% list. Without writing a book on everything that is wrong and unexamined about that list, let me just say that I don’t know anyone at the school district who believes Paul Revere should have landed on it. Junipero Serra has been overlooked too long — several years ago I thought it finally was JSerra’s year, when the whole Flynnarado fiasco happened (long story), but in the end people who were seriously considering JSerra jumped to other schools in R2 and beyond. JSerra has a great principal in Eve Cheung and reasonably good test scores (API of 756 in 2008; there was some kind of testing irregularity in 2009). Probably the worst thing about the school is its kind of dark facility and weird floor plan. The kids don’t seem to mind that part though — the last time I was there was for a performance in the cafeteria and it seemed like a pretty joyful place to me.
You think that because no one chose JSerra, it must not be desirable. Talk to my friends who remember when Alvarado and Miraloma were considered undesirable — not all that long ago. My own sister would rather have died than send her kids to Sunnyside, which you can see from the window of her living room — now I have blog commenters who are desperate for a seat at Sunnyside. When I was applying to Kindergarten for my daughter five years ago, Peabody was considered an awful choice and people from the Richmond District were often designated there when they went 0/7. It has the same principal and the same facility today, but suddenly the school is getting 14 requests for every seat. What changed? Nothing, except the neighborhood’s perception. The psychology governing which schools are chosen and which are not is less rational than you are making it out to be. Of course, sometimes there are very good reasons that a school is not chosen — but other times, not so much.
“I am happy to answer questions when I can with the data that’s been provided to me, but I also would like to remind people that all of this post-mortem is, in some ways, pointless. The system is going away. It doesn’t work.”
While I appreciate this statement, it is rather hard to deal with, because this is the system impacting my family’s life right now. I also went 0/7 and had what I thought were reasonable choices on my list, such as Sunnyside. I went to public school K-college, would love to send my son to public school, and want public schools to succeed for all kids, but I also need to do what is best for him. Sending him to our assigned school, which was just listed among the lowest 5% in the state, is just too risky. If we both did not work full time and could be there to volunteer frequently, it would be different. We plan to waitpool, but each day draws us closer to our parochial school option.
On my block, the 5 families who applied all went 0/7 and among my friends, about 35% got a school they listed. While 94110 might have done okay, Bernal does not appear to have fared well. Perhaps I am wrong and perhaps, as you said, it doesn’t matter, as the system is going away and we should focus on Round 2 and, in our case, our solid parochial option.
Thanks for providing as much transparency as possible to the process.
Rachel: wow, thanks for providing that 94110 data. Clearly rules out Zip Code (at least this one) would be a predictor of receiving *less* choice (and I might run the chi-squared test to see if it does, in fact, predict *more* or if it is just statistical noise).
I think it is certainly constructive to counsel pouring energies into Round 2. I’m subject to next year’s new system (at earliest), and I am more concerned about what it is about my peer group (I count Fiid, Mason, Brandon and possibly the anonymous VIBM as part) that is creating these most likely non-random effects. Very hard to test without looking at the applications of these 30-50 families that might make up the sub-population.
But to me, the most scary thing of watching this action and seeing the freak-out of my friends and neighbors is what it implies: they all probably chose nearly identical sets of schools, and so did enough other families that they just didn’t get any choices. And that implies that the options near my neighborhood are not deep enough to satisfy the demand.
This may not be true, but the simple case in point is Junipero Serra. Many families I know that went 0/7 were assigned to JS, and none of them chose it. Central enough to our neighborhood, it would be an overwhelming choice of my peer group were it desirable, or simply, on par with those schools being put on their lists. The fact that such a strong disparity exists between schools is the most frightening part about all of this.
Any selection process is merely a rationing of the most desired schools. Bring up all schools to the same level and you have less fuss about the rationing.
Fiid – I have no idea what the characteristics of your totally non-random sample of acquaintances have in common. I wouldn’t know where to start in defining a group of people with opposite characteristics.
I am happy to answer questions when I can with the data that’s been provided to me, but I also would like to remind people that all of this post-mortem is, in some ways, pointless. The system is going away. It doesn’t work. We’re putting a new system in place. I think your energies would be better spent figuring out what your options are now, and how to play Round II. The PPS-SFUSD counseling sessions are great for that. There’s one tomorrow night at John Muir (6-8 p.m.) and Saturday morning at Sunnyside (10-12).
I don’t mean to sound uncaring, but all the data in the world is not going to change the situation you and other 0/7s find yourselves in at this moment. There is no grand conspiracy or malicious intent in the system (I only wish we had the amount of staff and technology at 555 it would take to carry out such a devious plan).
The irate emailer has identified that their group has majority gone 0 for 7. This is true for my family, and also roughly 70% of the people who I’ve talked to.
This group is not hand selected based on the outcome of the lottery, but probably is pretty skewed based on neighborhood, affluence to some degree, approach to parenting, whatever. I suspect my entire sample is in the same “diversity pool” despite containing a number of different religions, nationalities, etc.
None of this data explains why in my and the irate emailer’s peer groups are showing 70% going 0 for 7 and the district wide statistic is 27%.
I think a better question might be; exactly what are we doing “wrong” that they we not a microcosm of the system as a whole? Do we make too much money, live in the wrong neighborhoods? In order for our group to score so poorly, there must be other groups that are batting over the average as well; which groups are those?
Brent and VIB Mom – darn, now you both have figured out that I like data! Here are the % of K applicants from 94110 in each category:
481 applicants total for K
323 (67.15%) got their first choice;
38 (7.90%) got their second choice
13 (2.70%) got their third choice;
13 (2.70%) got their fourth choice;
9 (1.87%) got their fifth choice;
5 (1.04%) got their sixth choice;
4 (0.83%) got their seventh choice;
76 (15.8%) got no choice at all.
So 94110 outperforms the City as a whole in terms of getting a first choice or any choice; fewer people in 94110 ended up 0/7 than the City as a whole.
Thanks, Very Irate Bernal Mom! I wanted data from a set of parents in our neighborhood to test a hypothesis: our neighborhood is under-served, as evaluated by the odds of someone from our neighborhood getting a choice on their 1-7 list.
Your 9/30 getting a choice is statistically different from the 2,530/3,466 in the district at large (p>=.001 for your stat-friendly people). What that means is that amongst the 30 you have polled, there is a non-random factor that predicts that they would face a significantly harder time getting a choice than city-wide.
I would like even more comprehensive data from an official source, by neighborhood (or Zip Code, at least), because an implication of this data is that the imbalance in our part of town is worse than the rest of the City, and we could use it to argue for improvements in the schools.
[I do note that there may be a selection bias in the 9/30 (Irate Mom could have found that those who got a choice were not telling her so, for instance).]
So I urge for even more granular data to understand where the choice process reveals a significantly less attractive pool of schools from which to choose!
SFUSD might get less abuse if it were more transparent about the rationale for a family’s getting/not getting a school they listed on the application.
For example, my family’s demographics (at least those discernible by the information submitted with our application) are roughly the same as the families who went 0/7, and we got our first choice, a city-wide immersion school. Why?
Why didn’t our neighbors get any of their choices? Why did people who listed Sunnyside in their 7 not get it, but others who didn’t list it were assigned there? Since the lottery is weighted, simply saying it’s dumb luck doesn’t really explain much.
I know that revealing the specific factors which influence assignment might lead to more gaming of the system, but without transparency, there is no accountability.
Hi Rachel-
Do you have any thoughts/comments/ideas on why the district does not require returning grades to register for the following year, the way that they require incoming K students to register?
It seems utterly crazy to me that they have no way of knowing if there will be any spots at a given school in grades 1-5 for an upcoming year, so that they can give students enterring other grades a legitimate idea of what their odds of getting a placement, the way they do for Kindergarten. Am I missing something, or is there a real reason that they don’t require the other grades to register for the coming school year?
Thanks for any info/comments/thoughts on this, which has profoundly baffled me since my oldest child went 0/7 in the lottery to enter K in 2008.
Thanks,
Julie
“And your motivation right now is to make sure that slot in a validly unpopular school doesn’t get filled by your kid but by Somebody Else’s.”
I guess I should say that a lot of the outrage against the lottery is when the letter comes and the sickening fear that instead of the unpopular school being filled with Somebody Else’s [low-SES] kid, that instead there’s a risk of it being My Kid. [It won’t, Mason, ‘cos it *will* work out eventually and you’re a resourceful guy, but anyway.]
The attempt to give out the Shit Tacos somewhat more equally socioeconomically is what really, from a political point of view, kills the lottery. See also Wake Forest’s attempts to make things more equitable, which got voted down recently.
I know this doesn’t really help, Mason. I’ll drop an email to you, just in case there’s anything I can help with.
I’m the Very Irate Mom who wrote Rachel originally, and I’m emphatically *not* a statistician (I don’t even play one on TV). To clarify, I observed that among a group of ~30 neighborhood friends and preschool classmates, ~70% had gone unassigned. My small sample seemed quite at odds with the district’s claim of 80% placement. To her credit, Rachel researched the question and shared the interesting data.
Like Frank, Mason, and Chris, I wonder what factors, if any, are shared by the 935 families that went 0/7. Are these families that relied too heavily on trophy schools? Attended preschool? Are concentrated in certain zip codes? Or, was rank not used as a tiebreaker among demographically-equivalent applicants?
If there *is* a unifying demographic factor that skewed the placements, that could be corrected in the Round 2 algorithm.
Again, thanks for posting this information so quickly. I appreciate the transparency that you bring to the board!
“Fifty percent is not bad but it might actually be *too good.* I think there is too much emphasis on accommodating a first choice to the exclusion of everyone getting *something.* To my surprise, 2nd through 7th placements make up only 22 percent of the overall places applicant pool. Shouldn’t this be higher?
With seven choices the District should statistically be able to place *all* families.”
Hi Mason. We’ve met, last time in the Liberty Cafe. Sorry to hear you went 0/7.
The answer is no, because ~20% of the district’s capacity is in schools that don’t get a lot of requests, because of one or more co-related factors:
– They’re in a bad neighborhood
– They have bad test scores
– They have low parental involvement
– They have low-SES families
– They’re dominated by one ethnicity
etc.
So, the purpose of the lottery is not only to divvy up the places in the trophy schools, but also who gets the unpopular schools.
So, to take a toy example, if you have 1000 applications and 1000 slots at 25 schools with a K class of 40 each, but the 1000 applications only list 20 of the schools, then 200 of the applications are not going to get any of their choices and end up at the unpopular schools.
Now some of those schools have one or more of the above factors to a lesser degree, but are really a so-called “hidden gem” – think Junipero Serra this year, or Sunnyside two years ago, or Miraloma 5-6 years ago.
But some really are schools that are unpopular for valid reasons. And your motivation right now is to make sure that slot in a validly unpopular school doesn’t get filled by your kid but by Somebody Else’s.
You’re a guy who did amazing work for the local library, and really deserved a better break than going 0/7, but the lottery unfortunately is just dumb luck.
Your amazing fundraising skills should be an asset to any private or parochial, so see what favors you can call in there. I’d hope you wouldn’t have to pull the trigger on a private or parochial Plan B, but having one would help with the frustration while dealing with the EPC and the lengthy process of R2 and the waitpools.
Generally, the longer you can wait, the more popular school you can get into. If you go for Starr King or JOES or Webster or Revere, you might get pretty quick resolution (by which I mean: you might get a place before June). If you hold out for, say, Buena Vista or Moscone or Taylor, you might hear in July-August. For e.g. Alvarado, you might get a place in the 10-day count or not at all.
Again, good luck.
“I want to add that the “statistician” could have figure this out herself without needing any extra information from the district.”
Yeah, it’s sad to see someone with grad degree in math/statistics forget to adjust the denominator as well as the nominator when estimating a percentage.
Interesting that the percentage of siblings was quite low this year. Maybe seeing the declining end of the post-9/11 baby boomlet?
I want to add that the “statistician” could have figure this out herself without needing any extra information from the district. She just have to use a little heuristic. The 2010 enrollment highlight document actually has statistics on the sibling enrollment on the most demanded schools. The sibling figure come out to be 36%. Otherwise she can even make up any reasonable assumption. Next step is to extrapolated this number to all applications and substract the sibling applications from the overall number. The estimated result in that case will be 69% of non-sibling get assigned. Whether it is Rachael’s official data or my heuristic, you can easily see the 70% unassigned claim is totally off the mark.
Through an informal survey of friends it seems to me that any one who sent their child to Pre school, didn’t get one of their choices. Mason comments above would be correct these are the same people with Plan B, private school. Is SF trying to filter these people out of the School system?
Mason K wrote: “With seven choices the District should statistically be able to place *all* families.”
Maybe statistically, but not when you look at the distribution of what families are choosing. There are a number of schools that receive very few choices, and a larger number that receive enormous numbers of choices (the immersion schools and the so-called “trophy schools”). If most families are choosing from a list of 25 of the district’s 73 elementary schools, then it stands to reason that we won’t be able to accommodate all of those choices. Over time we definitely have seen choice patterns shift, so schools like Miraloma, Grattan, Sunnyside, Peabody, etc. have become highly-requested in recent years. But we still have a significant number of schools that are not being chosen. We used to simply send people who didn’t get any of their choices a letter telling them they were “unassigned,” but the decision was made five? years ago to start designating people who went 0/7 to the school closest to them with openings. The idea was that people appreciate being offered something, even if it’s not what they wanted originally. And it happened that some people did discover they liked their assigned school once they went to look. Others, sadly, do not. It is a very persistent and frustrating supply/demand problem — we have enough schools/seats but not where people want them.
Fifty percent is not bad but it might actually be *too good.* I think there is too much emphasis on accommodating a first choice to the exclusion of everyone getting *something.* To my surprise, 2nd through 7th placements make up only 22 percent of the overall places applicant pool. Shouldn’t this be higher?
With seven choices the District should statistically be able to place *all* families.
On another practical note: one thousand families went 0/7 and didn’t get a choice at all even though they went on tours, visited classrooms, spoke with principals attended counseling sessions etc. Thats a gob of time!
It would be in the District’s best interest to review the socio-economic markers of these thousand “0/7 families.” My hunch is that these families that threw the brick are the same folks that also have a plan B that involves some kind of private school.
Thanks for your hard work!
Oops. I see than I put the overall numbers, not just K. It was 62% overall got #1 and 80% got one of 7. So it’s a 13% difference for first-choice non-siblings, not 10% as I had said.
Thanks for getting this info so quick. I know that the sibling effect stirs up a lot of smoke.
So, for non-siblings, 49% got their first choice and 73% got one of seven choices.
Overall, 60% of kindergartners got their first choice and 79% got one of 7.
So there is a 10% difference for first choices, which is significant. I wonder what the diversity profile looks like for those who went 0/7.
Also thanks for listing out the percent for 2-7 choices. I’m curious if the diminishing returns for listing lower choices is worth it. One of the best things about the incoming system is the elimination of the pick-seven bonus. Putting Rooftop (or whatever) as #7 just to fill up to get in the top cohort for Round II was one of the obvious byzantine things about the system.
Thanks so much for posting this kind of data.