Hogwarts Student Population

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 45294

At 21:44 13/10/02 +0000, marephraim wrote:

>I'm not familiar with the British boarding school system to know
>whether in such an institution there is only, say, one Math class
>for a particular grade. Could Hogwarts not have multiple DADA or
>Potions Classes for the first years? Harry shares Potions with the
>Slytherins but there could be more than one Potions classes for
>Gryffindor first years.

Of course, it's not impossible for there to be more than one stream, but we 
also have classes shared with other Houses (two examples we have with 
numbers attached are the PS/SS flying lesson - 20 brooms for G&S - and the 
CoS Herbology lesson - 20 earmuffs for G&H). Simply from an organisational 
standpoint, it would make more sense to have all pupils from one House in 
the same lesson rather than split the lesson between two houses twice.

I'm not sure if that was clear, but to put it another way, assuming there 
are, say, 20 second-year pupils in each of Gryffindor and Hyfflepuff, 
rather than have the 20 Herbology pupils made up of one set of 10 
Gryffindors and 10 Hufflepuffs in one lesson and another 10 Gs and 10 Hs in 
another, it would have been easier to simply have all 20 Gryffindors in one 
class, and the 20 Hufflepuffs in another.

The one piece of canon we have which is unequivocal about the number of 
boys in Harry's year is that each year, his dorm in the tower is "the [X] 
years' boys' dorm" implying that the five boys in Harry's dorm are all the 
Gryffindors for each year. Now, whether or not we're allowed to extrapolate 
figures from this is debatable, but any variations would be unlikely to be 
particularly huge. After all, after four years at Hogwarts, nobody, least 
of all the boys in Harry's dorm, have commented that there are very few of 
them compared to the other Houses/years.

For instance, when I was at school, the year above mine had at least 50% 
more pupils than the average for the others, and this was an incessant 
source of comment.