Verifiable affirmative action in school admissions

In many reserve-based affirmative action systems, admission cutoffs are publicly disclosed to enable students to verify whether reserved seats are correctly assigned. We introduce a verifiability criterion: each student must be able to confirm her assigned school and seat type using only her own score and the disclosed cutoffs, under two intuitive verification protocols. We show that a mechanism is individually rational, strategy-proof, and verifiable if and only if it is essentially a deferred acceptance mechanism using one of the two choice rules we characterize. We highlight one rule that assigns reserved seats only when a student cannot secure an open seat on merit. We apply our characterization to China's high school admissions and discuss its implications for affirmative action policies in Brazil and India.