This morning, I woke up, placed my bid for Medical Sociology and then logged onto the school's intranet to see what the module was going to be like. I know, it wasn't the smartest thing but I'm glad I checked it out anyway (a smart person would have probably checked it out BEFORE placing the bid). It was then I realised that the course prefers people who have taken another course which I haven't taken nor have the intention to take.

In a last ditch attempt to change to something more. elementary, I spent close to an hour looking through ALL the course offerings before finally finding ONE that I could substitute for. Public Administration in Asia.  It doesn't sound like the most interesting course; in fact, I'd even go as far to say that IF medical sociology were a 4 on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the most interesting and 1 being a total bore, this would either be a 3, maybe even a 2.5. But I decided to change the bid and replaced medical sociology with this course (which I really, really hope I don't regret taking).

So, as I was making my new bid, this random thought (I'd like to think of it as an epiphany) sprung to my head. I don't know why, but it did. I thought: Hey! What if in paying for the course we've successfully bidded for, we make the person who made the highest bid pay the FULL amount of his (highest) bid while everyone else pays the minimum bid (the cut-off that allows you to take the course)?

For people not in the institution I study at, we obtain our courses through a stressful process known as bidding. Everyone adds the course they want and places a certain number of points in the hopes of getting the course. If the class is undersubscribed, everyone gets away with 1 point. If it's oversubscribed, the system ranks the bid according to the number of points and the top -insert number of vacancies- bids wins and everyone pays the number of points the lowest successful bidder places.

Back to my idea, if we were to penalise the highest bidder for placing the highest bid (which usually has this really effective influence in driving the bid points UP), no one would want to be the person with the highest bid! People would adjust their bids to be as low as possible to avoid being the highest bidder, or if you really ended up being the highest bidder, you wouldn't be too far off from the cut off anyway! With people placing bids that they think are low enough to get them the module without being the highest bidder, we can expect that most modules would see a drop in the cut off and the people who would really benefit are the students still in their first 2 years. Think about it, if you had another 2-3 years to go, would you really want to throw all your points down for a course (when bidding among your peers), end up the highest bidder and become what could possibly be the poorest person in your cohort for being silly enough to become the highest bidder?