Registro Course Bidding by EDTEX

Points-based course bidding for business and law schools

Analytics

Education

SaaS

Hello, My name is Arun, and I am one of the co-founders of EDTEX (https://www.edtex.in). I am posting this for anyone who runs elective allocation at a business school, law school, or university, or who has been asked to automate it. We have built and successfully deployed customised academic operations solutions at leading business schools, law schools, and universities: ISB Hyderabad, SDA Bocconi Milan, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode, IIM Indore, and IIM Mumbai; private business schools including BITSoM Mumbai, KJSIM Mumbai, NMIMS Mumbai, and TAPMI Manipal and Bangalore; and universities including Manipal University, Ashoka University, OPJGU, and SNU Noida. Anyone who has run elective allocation knows how that week goes. A few courses are oversubscribed several times over, preference forms come back half-filled, and the programme office spends days allocating seats in a spreadsheet. Then the emails start: students who missed a course they needed, two electives that clash in the timetable, a prerequisite nobody checked, and questions about why one student got a seat and another did not. And when add/drop opens, it all starts again. Since 2017, we have developed software for academic offices, and elective allocation has always come up in our discussions. That is why we built Registro Course Bidding. In short, Registro Course Bidding is elective course bidding software for business schools, law schools, and universities. Each student receives a budget of bid points and bids for the electives they want. Seats go to the highest bids, up to each course’s capacity, within your rules on prerequisites, credits, and timetable clashes. Business schools use bidding because bids show how much students value each course, not just the order in which they rank them. Further information is available here: https://www.edtex.in/products/co... Here is a story from the programme office. The office collects ranked preferences through a form, allocates seats overnight in a spreadsheet, and uses CGPA to break ties. The results go up at nine in the morning. By ten, two students who ranked the same elective first have very different outcomes: one has every course she wanted, the other has none, and neither can see why. By lunchtime, the inbox is full, a queue has formed outside the office, and add/drop has not even started. This is hard because elective allocation is a market design problem. Seats are scarce, students value courses very differently, and every allocation has to respect capacities, prerequisites, credit limits, and the timetable. A ranked list cannot show how much a student wants a course, so ties pile up and every tie-break looks arbitrary to someone. Yet most programme offices still run it on forms and spreadsheets. What does Registro Course Bidding actually do? You configure the rules for each round: the bid-point budget, course capacities, prerequisites, credit caps, and which programmes can take which electives. Students then bid within those rules. In open rounds, they can watch clearing bids and seat availability live; in closed rounds, bids stay sealed until the round ends. The same algorithm processes every bid, with no manual intervention, so every allocation can be checked rather than taken on trust. A typical cycle runs as a series of rounds: demand estimation surveys to decide which electives to offer and how many sections to run, a practice round so students learn the system, the final bidding round, and then waitlists and add/drop. Registro runs all of them in one place and flags timetable clashes and missing prerequisites as students bid. Add/drop and cancellations have their own workflow too. If a course is cancelled or changed, the office can reopen the window for the students affected. They are notified automatically and can re-bid or choose another course with free seats, so nobody has to rebuild the allocation by hand. Registro Course Bidding is in use at IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, and ISB Hyderabad. At IIM Raipur, it ran a multi-round process for around 380 students, covering demand estimation, bidding, waitlisting, and add/drop. How do AI agents help manage elective course bidding? Most of the pressure comes during live rounds, when hundreds of students are bidding at once and the same questions arrive again and again. Registro includes AI agents for exactly this: students and the programme office can ask questions in plain language and get answers straight from the live round data. The Academic Operations Analytics dashboard gives the MBA office a live view of every stage, from demand estimation and practice bidding to final bidding and add/drop. This results in a true 10x reduction in manual work. Who can leverage Course Bidding Automation for 10X outcomes? Programme offices, MBA offices, deans’ offices, and registrars at business schools, law schools, and universities, in other words, anyone who allocates scarce elective seats across one or more programmes. Registro Course Bidding can be used on its own or as part of the broader Registro suite, which includes timetabling, registration, attendance, grading, fees, course feedback, and student exchange. Because bidding and timetabling share the same data, allocations and the timetable stay in step. It sends enrolments to Salesforce via an API, exchanges data with student information systems such as Ellucian and Anthology Student, and supports SSO via Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID. Deployment typically takes one to four weeks. And what about your own institution? How are electives allocated at your institution today, and what happens when add/drop opens? You can write to me at arun@edtex.in