School Choice in Guangzhou: Why High-Scoring Students Are Protected?

• Main Author: Yuanju Fang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Games
• Subjects: school choice; immediate acceptance mechanism; test score
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/12/2/31

Each year, millions of middle school graduates in China take a standardized test and compete for high school positions. Unlike other cities, Guangzhou still uses the immediate acceptance mechanism but implements a policy that students in the high-scoring group receive their allocations before those in the low-scoring group. In this paper, we study a class of the Guangzhou mechanisms, including the immediate acceptance (IA) and the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism. We show that, if a collection of groups is refined by splitting its groups into a larger number of smaller subgroups, then the Guangzhou mechanism will perform more stably and less manipulable than before. This result provides a tool for policy makers to improve the allocation outcome of the IA mechanism under homogeneous priorities and justifies the use of a high-scoring student protection policy in Guangzhou’s high school admission.