Smart Match is for creating teams based on your customized parameters, weights and preferences. This tool can take hours of manual matchmaking and complete it in minutes! To collect student criteria, you wish to match on, you can add new fields to your project bidding feature or student data fields for import. For a detailed look at how to create these fields, click here.
Using Smart Match
- Open bidding to ask students for their project preferences (and any other questions you have added to your bidding configuration).
- Click Dashboard > TeamBuilder > Smart Match
Setting Global Matching Requirements
- Minimum and maximum team size targets
- Minimum custom limit(s)
- This feature allocates students across projects with whichever properties you select. For example, you can use GPA data to allocate at least one high GPA student per team.
- Student bidding preferences
- Weight your prioritization for student's preferred project placement whether you use ranking or score.
- Criteria: use any collected student data (either from bidding or student import) to match for similarity, diversity or No Mixing, which is a hard requirement that students not be separated. A common example of No Mixing is course section to ensure teams are comprised of only students within the same section.
- Click Perform Match. Once matching is complete, you can click View Placement Metrics to see how successful your match was based on getting students on a top preferred project.
Diversity, Similarity and No Mixing Options Explained
Diversity: Optimize criteria for diversity across a team.
Similarity: Optimize criteria similarity across a team. Commonly used for availability.
No Mixing: Below is an example of No Mixing, commonly used for Course Section criteria to enforce matching within the same sections.
Setting Per-project Matching Requirements
Click Edit Project on any given project. From here, you can set the minimum/maximum team size target and apply custom limit allocations that are project-specific. This is helpful for interdisciplinary projects that require, as an example, 3 marketing students and a CS student.