Nursing Application and Lottery Process
To apply to the nursing program, students must complete an online application. It requires you to submit
information about your background and experience which, after verification, is used to produce an “application
score”. If you have not met the minimum nursing program requirements, your application score will be assigned a
zero and you will not be eligible to participate in the lottery.
The lottery is the process which TCC uses to randomly select qualified students to fill its nursing cohorts. All
students who successfully apply to the nursing program will have their student ID number submitted once to the
lottery. At the appropriate time, using a sophisticated mathematical software program, these student IDs are
randomly selected and used to fill the upcoming cohorts. However, this lottery system also awards bonus points
for additional items discussed below. The more points you are awarded, the more times your name will appear in
the lottery and thus, the greater the chance your name will be selected. The points and process is described
below.
All students who are qualified to participate in the lottery will be assigned a score based on their application. The
score is comprised of the following areas:
A. Base points
B. Weighted points
C. Weighted penalty points
1.
Base Points.
50 base points are awarded to all students who complete and meet the basic nursing program
requirements:
a. Completion of prerequisites/requirements
b. Submission of transcripts by published deadline
c. Completion of nursing program application
2.
Weighted Points.
Additional points are awarded to students for the following:
a. Each grade of “A” in the following courses is awarded 10 additional points (for a maximum of 30
points possible):
 Bio 241
 Bio 242
 Bio 260
 There are three other required classes, but they will not generate any bonus points.
 All six required courses must have a score of “B” or better, or else the student will not be eligible
for the TCC nursing program: they will get a weight of 0 regardless of any other considerations.
b. Students receiving a TEAS score of greater than 91% are awarded 10 additional points.
c. Students receiving a TEAS score between 78% and 91% are awarded 5 additional points.
d. Students receiving a TEAS score below some minimum score are not eligible for the program; they
will get a weight of 0 regardless of all other considerations.
e. Students with healthcare experience involving direct patient care are awarded 10 additional points.
f. Students with military experience are awarded 10 additional points.
g. Students who take their prerequisite (?) credits at TCC are awarded the following addition points:
 30 or more credits are awarded 10 points
 15-29 credits are awarded 5 points
h. Nursing prerequisite course grades that are below an “A” are awarded face value points as follows:
 A = (4.0 – 3.0) * 10 = 10 points
 A- = (3.8 – 3.0) * 10 = 8 points
 B+ =( 3.6 – 3.0) * 10 = 6 points
 B = (3.0 – 3.0) * 10 = 0 points
Note: These points apply to Bio 241, 242, & 260. Also required are Eng 101, Psy 200, and Chem 121,
but these courses don’t generate bonus points. All six classes must have a score of “B” or better.
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3.
Weighted Penalty Points
Points will be subtracted from the 50 base points for the following:
 Each course retake in the following will subtract 10 points (for a maximum of 30 points):
 Bio 241
 Bio 242
 Bio 260
How the lottery works
We begin by putting all students in a list of “candidates”, and start with an empty list of “winners”. All
students will eventually be moved from the “candidates” list to the “winners” list, but the order in the
“winners” list will control which students actually get into the program, starting with the first “winner”,
then the second, until all of the available slots are taken up. In the lotteries we’ve done in the past, we
usually ended up taking about the first 30 students in the list. If a student “wins” the lottery and is
chosen, and the student for some reason can’t take the position, we just take the next student in the
sorted list.
If there are, say, 200 students in the lottery, there are actually 199 “drawings (or stages)”.
For each stage of the drawing:
1. Add up all the weight numbers of the students in the current “candidate” list to get a total
weight.
2. Each student is assigned a probability of being selected at this stage: (the student’s weight)/(the
total of all the weights)
3. The sum total of all the students’ probabilities is 100%.
4. A random number is generated, and used to select one student using the weights.
5. The selected student is moved from the list of “candidates” to the next position in the list of
“winners”
6. The lottery drawing is now repeated with one fewer students.
7. Finally, the very last student goes at the end of the list of “winners”.
So, at each drawing stage, a student with, say 120 points, has twice as much chance of being selected as
a student with only 60 points. And six times as much chance as a student with only 20 points. If the
total number of points at some late stage is, for example 120, and a student has 60 points, that student
has a 50-50 chance of being selected at this stage. If this student isn’t selected at this stage, this student
will have more than a 50% chance of being selected at the next stage. As long as a student has more
than zero “points”, the student has a chance of being selected. If all students enter the lottery with
exactly the same number of points, the lottery operates just like the previous lottery system: each
student has exactly the same chance as any other student.
Perhaps a picture will help. To keep it simple, let’s say we have 5 students at this stage:
Al with 80 points
Bea with 62 points
Carla with 67 points
Doug with 110 points
Ed with 120 points
The total number of points is 439
Al’s probability of being selected at this stage is 80/439, or about 18.2%.
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At this stage, a random number is chosen in the range of 0-439. Assume it comes up as 172. That
number is in “Carla’s box” (which runs from 142 to 209), and Carla is chosen as the next student to be
moved from “candidates” to “winners”. Now there are only four students left, with a total of 372
points. In the next stage, a number between 0 and 372 is generated, the picture is adjusted without
Carla, and the next student is chosen. This repeats until all students have been moved from
“candidates” to “winners”.
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