Say you have a class with 5 sections: A,B,C,D,E. Each section meets at different times, thus students registering for the course will have preference for which section they will take (they can only take one section). When students register for the course, they list 3 sections they would prefer to take, in order of preference.
Each section has n students. Let's say for simplicity that exactly n*5 students have registered for the course.
So, the question is: How do you efficiently match students to their preferred section?
I've seen some questions with similar matching scenario questions, but none quite fit and I'm afraid I don't know enough about algorithms to make up my own. BTW, this is a real problem and I know the department in question takes a few days to do it by hand.