[HPforGrownups] Snape favors Slytherin?

[Kelly Grosskreutz]

No: HPFGUIDX 56470

I have seen a lot of discussion about how Snape favors his own house.  I
haven't been on here long enough yet to know about what kinds of discussions
have taken place on here, but I have been on quite a few websites that have
gone on about how Snape favors Draco in particular.  There is reason to
support this, and quite a bit of support from the books as well.  However, I
just saw a post that argued that Snape doesn't really favor Slytherin at
all, and pointed out how we have never seen Snape give or take away points
to them.  All we have seen is Snape take away points from Gryffindor
(unknown how often he does with the other two houses, although it can be
safe to assume they lose points from him as well).

But does he really favor Slytherin and Draco?  Point one:  the
aforementioned point giving.  We have never heard Snape give as much as one
point to Draco or any other member of Slytherin.  If he truly favored his
own house, don't you think he'd find absurd reasons to award them points?
He is quite good at coming up with reasons to take points away from
Gryffindor, some reasonable, and some approaching the absurd (for being a
know-it-all).

The other thing I have noticed is who always gets top marks in his class.
If he truly favored his own students above all others, Draco Malfoy would be
the top student in Potions.  Instead, who is that person?  None other than
Hermione Granger.  Granted, in PoA Harry thinks that Snape is scribbling
down a zero when his potion doesn't turn out right for his final, but we
never find out for sure.  I can see Snape making it look that way to torture
Harry, but it seems that when it comes to final grades, Snape is actually
quite fair.  Hermione gets top marks like we all know she should, Draco gets
somewhere below that, and Harry does not flunk the class.  Harry probably
did get some points for his potion, depending on what parts he did correctly
and just where exactly in the process he screwed up.  Plus we don't know if
the classwork they do throughout the year gets added in with their final
exam.  All those essays he assigns has to count for something.

In short, Snape is hard on his students, sometimes downright mean and
unnecessarily cruel, he seems to delight in taking away points from all
houses but his own and rewarding points to no one, but when it comes down to
grades, I have never heard of a Gryffindor complaining that Snape gave them
a grade they did not deserve.  As for Harry, he does believe Dumbledore
interceded in the case of his grade, but we will never know for sure if that
is the case or if Harry had done well enough on his other work to carry him
through, or even well enough on that one botched potion.  Either way, he
seemed to think his grade was fair enough, whether or not Dumbledore had to
talk to Snape about it first.

Kelly Grosskreutz
http://www.idcnet.com/~ivanova