Student Elective Allocation Tool

2018
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Introduction
Please read the introduction before jumping to the FAQs.

SEAT stands for Student Elective Allocation Tool.

Starting from the 2015 batch, the curriculum for B.Tech. and Dual Degree students has been
revised to include many more electives [1] [2]. There is a significant increase from the number of
electives that were allowed in the old curriculum. Students have flexibility in choosing electives
from other departments starting as early as in their third semester. To enable students to have
choice in electives that they wish to pursue, all departments are requested to allow (a fixed
number of) students from other departments in all their courses, including core courses. In this
context, an offline process may not be a viable solution given that many students will credit
electives across departments. SEAT is a tool envisioned to enable students to express
preferences over courses, instructors to provide criteria for selection and ranking of students,
and finally produce a fair allocation of elective courses to students.

SEAT ensures that course capacities, prerequisites for courses are treated as hard constraints
that will not be violated. In addition, for every student, the allotments are free of slot-conflicts
and the number of credits allotted is within the credit limit provided by the student.

SEAT operates in 2 rounds. Any modification to the allotment after the 2nd round is outside the
purview of SEAT.

The overall sequence of events is:

1 Departments /Instructor provides course details -> Students selects CORE subjects and provide
elective preferences in workflow -> Faculty advisor approves CORE subjects in workflow -> SEAT
allocation for electives -> Students view their allotted courses in workflow
2 Students drop unwanted Round1 allotments -> Student view vacancies -> Student fill second round
choices -> SEAT allocation for electives -> Students view their allotted courses in workflow.
 Student FAQ
What are inputs to SEAT?
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 in an order of preference.
3. A colour for each course.

How do I know what courses I am eligible to take?

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.

How do I form my preference list when I have several types of electives to credits like
Humanities, Mathematics and others?
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 colour code the courses in your preference list.

What is a colour for a course in the student’s preference list?

Students may have a subset of courses in their preference list from which they wish to pick only
one. In that case, the student should give all the courses in this subset a single colour.
There is no restriction on the number of courses that can be grouped under one colour, but it
should be noted that every course can get at most 1 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 . Among the
courses that are with the “no colour option”, a student can get allotted multiple courses, subject
to their credit limit.
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.

What about COT (Consent of Teacher) for courses?

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

What are the different ranking criteria for courses to rank students?
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.

How is ranking criteria different from pre-requisites?

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.

What are some of the things students should keep in mind when filling preferences?
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”.

What happens to students who do not get allocated enough electives or are dissatisfied with
some of their allotted courses?
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 allotment. Note that student is not guaranteed to get allotted to a
course in the replace and might remain unallotted.

What are timelines for SEAT in the upcoming semester (JUL-NOV 2018)?
See the annexure.

For queries regarding SEAT write to seat@wmail.iitm.ac.in

Annexure
Timelines for SEAT for JUL-NOV 2018 Registration

Date Activity

June 15, 2018 First round of elective allocation done through SEAT is given to
Workflow

June 20, 2018 Elective allocation will be visible to faculty advisers for approval

June 20, 2018 Elective allocation is visible to students

July 30, 2018 -- Aug. Dropping courses and replacing it through SEAT
1, 2018

Aug. 2, 2018 Updating databases with vacancies in each course

Aug. 3, 2018 -- Aug. Students see the vacancies and provide new preference list
6, 2018

Aug. 7, 2018 Second round of elective allocation done through SEAT is sent to
Workflow and the students