How to Establish an Elective Course Bidding Policy in Business and Law Schools

The short answer: an elective course bidding policy is the rulebook your programme committee publishes before the first round opens. It should settle how many bid points each student gets, how many rounds you run, how seats are shared across programmes, which credit, concentration and prerequisite rules apply, how waitlists and Add/Drop work, and how you communicate the rules and handle disputes. Settle these on paper first, and students, faculty and the programme office all work from the same rules.

Most complaints about elective bidding are not about the bidding itself. They come from rules that were never written down, or were written down after the round had closed. This guide takes a programme committee through the decisions in order, with a checklist at the end. If you are new to the method, start with what elective course bidding is and how it compares with FCFS and ranked preferences.

Why should the bidding policy be written before the first round?

Students plan their electives around the rules. Every programme sets minimum and maximum credit requirements per term, and every concentration, major or minor has its own requirements on top of that. Students have to check prerequisites, Add/Drop deadlines, credit limits and specialisation requirements before they place a single point.

If those rules sit in old emails and the programme chair's memory, the programme office ends up deciding cases one at a time. Picture a student who wins seats in three electives, then finds that one of them does not count towards their concentration and a second clashes with a core course. Nothing in the bidding went wrong. The policy simply never said what should happen.

BITSoM Mumbai faced this from the other direction. When it launched its MBA programme in 2022, it had no elective bidding process at all. EDTEX worked with the MBA Programme Office to design the process, establish policies and configure programme-specific credit rules before the first cycle. Seven bidding cycles later, manual effort for the programme office and students is down 95% and student queries during registration are down 99%. Read the BITSoM case study.

What should the policy say about bid points?

In a bidding system, each student receives a predetermined number of bid points to spend across the electives they want. The policy has to answer:

• Budget: does every student in a programme start with the same number of points? Equal budgets are what make bidding feel fair.
• Carry-over: do unspent points roll into the next term, or expire?
• Different programmes: if programmes receive different budgets, how will you stop one cohort outbidding another?
• Open or closed: will students see live demand while the round runs, or submit sealed bids?

How many bidding rounds should you run?

Bidding usually runs over more than one round, so students can adjust their strategy based on earlier results. A typical sequence is an initial bidding round, a results announcement, an Add/Drop period for adjustments, and final course confirmation. Many schools add a demand estimation round before the first bidding round, so the programme office knows which electives are likely to be over- or undersubscribed.

"The EDTEX Course Bidding System successfully supported our multi-round bidding process for around 380 students, including demand estimation, bidding, waitlisting and add/drop rounds." Prof. Jagrook Dawra, PGP Chairperson, IIM Raipur

Write the dates, duration and purpose of every round into the policy. Read the IIM Raipur case study.

How should seats be shared across programmes?

When students from more than one programme compete for the same electives, the policy needs seat quotas. The model most schools use is two rounds: bid within programme quotas first, then remove the quotas and open the remaining seats to everyone. We cover this in detail in how to run elective course bidding across multiple graduate programmes.

Law schools need the same rules. NLS Bangalore runs elective selection for its BA LLB (Hons.), LLM and other graduate degrees on a single platform, with cross-programme access to electives across law, business, policy and international relations. Read the NLS Bangalore case study.

Which credit, concentration and prerequisite rules belong in the policy?

This is where most disputes start, so be specific:

• Credit limits: the minimum and maximum credits a student may carry each term.
• Concentration rules: which electives count towards each major, minor or specialisation, and how many are required.
• Prerequisites: which advanced electives need a prior course, and whether the system blocks bids that do not meet them.
• Other credit types: universities also offer non-credit workshops, project-based credits, audit courses and specialised concentration courses. Decide which of these go through bidding and which count towards credit limits.

These rules should be enforced by the system at the point of bidding, not checked by hand afterwards. OP Jindal Global University runs multi-term bidding across more than 10 schools and 45 programmes, each with its own credit policies, seat-sharing rules and concentration requirements. With those rules automated on Registro, manual effort fell by more than 97% and student queries by 99%. Read the OPJGU case study.

How should waitlists and Add/Drop work?

Decide before the first round:

• How waitlist positions are ordered, and whether students move into seats automatically or must confirm.
• How many Add/Drop rounds you run, and their deadlines.
• Whether a student can drop an elective won in bidding, and what happens to the points spent on it.
• When the allocation becomes final for timetabling and faculty planning.

NMIMS Mumbai runs multi-trimester bidding with Add/Drop rounds, concentration-based elective selection and automatic waitlist movement, so students in the queue move into available seats without manual intervention. Read the NMIMS case study.

How will you communicate the policy to students?

A policy only works if students read it before they bid. Publish the full rules, the timeline and the electives list well ahead of the first round, and tell students plainly what they should do:

1. Review the complete electives list well before the deadline.
2. Check the prerequisites for every course of interest.
3. Plan a credit load that balances ambition with workload.
4. Track every bidding and Add/Drop deadline.
5. Keep backup courses ready in case first choices are unavailable.
6. Speak to an academic adviser when unsure.

Guides, workshops and live support during the round help too. IIM Calcutta has run 21 term-level bidding cycles on Registro since 2017, covering more than 3,000 students, with that onboarding support in every cycle and student satisfaction consistently above 4.5 out of 5. Read the IIM Calcutta case study.

How should disputes and exceptions be handled?

Some requests will always fall outside the rules. The policy should say what counts as valid grounds for an exception, such as a technical failure or a timetable change made after bidding. It should name who decides, set a window for raising a request, and require every decision to be recorded. Transparent allocation, where students can see how seats were won, prevents most disputes from arising at all.

Checklist: your elective bidding policy

1. Bid-point budgets per programme, and the carry-over rule.
2. Open or closed bidding.
3. Rounds, dates and durations, including demand estimation.
4. Seat quotas across programmes and when they lift.
5. Credit limits, concentration rules and prerequisites.
6. Waitlist ordering and Add/Drop deadlines.
7. Student guide and communication plan.
8. Exception and dispute process.

Frequently asked questions

Who should own the elective bidding policy?

The programme committee or programme chair should approve it, with the programme office drafting the operational detail and faculty consulted on seat limits.

How often should the policy be reviewed?

Review it after every cycle, using the query log and the allocation data, and publish any changes before the next round opens.

Should credit rules be checked manually after bidding?

No. Credit limits, concentration rules and prerequisites should be enforced by the system while students bid, so invalid bids never reach allocation.

Can a new school start with a full bidding policy?

Yes. BITSoM Mumbai designed its policies alongside its first MBA cohort and has since run seven bidding cycles on them.

Related reading

• What is elective course bidding?
• How to run elective course bidding across multiple graduate programmes
• FAQs on the course bidding process using Registro
• Registro Course Bidding

To discuss designing an elective bidding policy for your programmes, write to us at registro@edtex.in or request a demo.