How to rank schools in a lottery: your true order is the best strategy
Every enrollment season, families ask the same question: “Should I really put my first choice first?” With Sorteo’s draw, the answer is yes — always. Listing schools in your true order of preference is the best strategy there is, and that isn’t advice or policy: it’s a tested property of the algorithm that matches every seat.
The fear: “If I aim high, do I lose my safe school?”
The worry is rational. Under older “immediate acceptance” mechanisms (often called the Boston mechanism) schools filled their seats right away with the families who ranked them first. If you aimed high and missed, your second-choice school could already be full of other families’ first choices, and you’d slide past it to your third or fourth. Under that system, hiding your true favorite really could be the smart move. That is exactly the system Sorteo doesn’t run.
How the draw actually works
Three pieces decide every match, and all three are published after the draw:
- One lottery number per child. Each child gets a single random number, used at every school they rank. It comes from a public randomness source, so there is no school where you’re “luckier.”
- Each school ranks its applicants. A school orders everyone who listed it: priority groups first (a sibling already enrolled, for example; whatever your district’s published rules grant), then by lottery number within each group.
- Deferred acceptance. Your child’s application “proposes” to your first choice. A school holds its best applicants only tentatively: no seat is final until every application has been considered. If your child is turned away at one school, they propose to your next choice with the same number and the same standing as if they’d started there.
One detail some districts enable: an opt-in sibling boost that gently nudges siblings toward the same school. It never overrides a real priority claim, and the published draw record shows when it was used.
The guarantee: aiming high never costs you
Because no seat is final until everything settles, three things are guaranteed:
- Listing your true favorite first can never cost your child a seat at a school lower on your list. Trying for a long shot doesn’t burn your place at your safe school.
- Your child gets one offer: the best one their priority and lottery number can earn among the schools you ranked.
- No child loses a seat to someone with weaker priority and a worse lottery number; economists call this a stable match.
These aren’t policy promises. They are tested, mathematical properties of the published algorithm (student-proposing deferred acceptance), and every draw publishes the full per-school rankings and cutoffs that let anyone check them.
So how should you rank? Honestly.
- List every school you’d genuinely accept, in your true order of preference. Your real favorite goes first, even if it feels like a long shot.
- Don’t list a school you’d decline. The draw can only match your child to schools you ranked: a school on your list is a school you might be offered.
- Don’t shorten your list to look “committed.” Leaving off acceptable backups can’t improve your chances anywhere else; it can only cost you a seat you’d have wanted.
After the draw: you can only trade up
The same logic continues once results are out. Accepting an offer never takes your child out of line for any school you ranked higher. If a seat later opens at one of those schools and your child’s place on its published ranking earns it, you get the new offer and you choose whether to take it. Waitlist movement only ever goes up your list, never down: the seat you hold is never at risk.
Check it yourself
None of this rests on trust. Every draw’s public results page shows each school’s full ranking, every admission cutoff, and the public randomness (drand) the lottery numbers came from: enough to recompute the entire match. See how a draw is verified →