I'd love to see these policies tested, e.g., have five high school kids with class scheduling issues attempt to resolve them themselves, and another five have their parents call, and compare how the process goes.
E.g., one year:
Me: requests A and B
Friend: requests A and non-honors B
hour 4: Me in non-honors B; friend in gym.
hour 5 (only hour honors B is offered): Me in A; friend in honros B.
Based on a few years of observations, I'm almost certain courses were filled using some variant of this algorithm:
for each student s sorted by student number:
for each non-filled course c in hour 1..n:
if(s wants c and not in c): assign s to c and continue to next hour.
for each non-filled course c in hour 1..n:
if(s wants c' and not in c' and c is like c'): assign s to c and continue to next hour.
Things got better each year but never in a way that would suggest someone finally decided to pick up an algorithms textbook.
I suspect by now they've purchased something that works or else managed to prove P=NP and the solution is billions of if statements fixing special cases the teachers/students complained loudly enough about...