--1. re the idea that the rating might tactically degenerate to "approval voting" (all 100 and 0 ratings) A. we could forbid two equal ratings. B. it is likely tactically unwise to give all 100s and 0s anyway. If you do, then you are unable to distinguish among the 0s. You might get an 0, then you'll be stuck with a bad 0 rather than a less-bad 0 which you could have easily avoided. --2. I am buoyed to hear about Guy Haworth and his matching task. This seems to me to be a "proof of principle" demonstration. And apparently Univ. of Reading agreed that ratings worked better than rankings, otherwise they switched for no reason.
The task of matching final year students to Individual Final Year Projects, with no two students doing the same project, is the same.
At the University of Reading (SSE), we switched from:
a) asking students to rank their most favoured five projects in order, to b) asking them to say how much they wanted to do the project with an integer in the range [3, 10]
This gives the students more 'voice' in their application form - as awarding points does express a ranking, admittedly possibly with some ties.
With 200 students, the LP program runs in a fraction of a second.
In a second running of this program, when limits on the number of students going to one supervisor were imposed, more students got their lower choices.
The solution, available to us but not available to the school-assignment problem, is to nominate alternative supervisors for projects - and avoid portmanteau projects like 'Create an App for a mobile phone'.
The LP theory of all this has been known for a long time.
Guy