Choice of James as Head Boy (was Re: James, a paragon of virtue?)

[alshainofthenorth]

No: HPFGUIDX 123896


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "nkafkafi" <nkafkafi at y...> 
wrote:
> 
> > Potioncat:
> > Unless I'm mistaken, we really only know three Head Boys:  Tom 
> > Riddle (chosen by Dippet), James Potter and Percy Weasley (chosen 
> by 
> > DD) Tom and Percy both had 12 NEWTS or was it OWLs? (Someone? 
> > Anyone?)
> >
> 
> Neri:
> Bill Weasley was also a Head Boy, according to the lexicon 
> http://www.hp-lexicon.org/wizards/bill.html
> 
> I don't think we know how many OWLs Tom had, but IIRC Bill also had 
> 12 OWLs, although his page in the lexicon doesn't mention it. Did I 
> only dream it?

Alshain:
No, Neri, you aren't dreaming at all. COS, chapter "At Flourish & 
Blott's", p.40 (Bloomsbury ed.)
"[...]Twelve OWLs and he hardly gloated at all.'
'Ordinary Wizarding Levels,' George explained[...]. 'Bill got twelve, 
too. If we're not careful, we might get another Head Boy in the 
family.'" 
 
This is conjecture, but I'm fairly sure that Cedric would have become 
Head Boy in the OOTP year, had he lived. How could he not?

Now to the question of Dumbledore's bias and an attempt to be 
statistical about it:

AFAIK, we don't know who picks prefects and Head Boys/Girls. It may 
be that when the Sorting Hat sorts pupils, most Head Boy/Girl 
material automatically goes to Gryffindor on account of their 
virtues. Or Gryffindor House, the Weasleys, and Harry, may pay 
greater attention to former Gryffindors as being of their ilk, in 
which case the selective bias lies with our POV character. 

Dumbledore has been Headmaster for more than twenty years, and 
Gryffindor would have to get the HB and HG posts anyway, even were 
they selected at random. The probability for the HB or the HG to be a 
Gryffindor in any year is 1/4, and 1/16 for both. Three Gryffindor 
HB's and one HG are quite reasonable, so the data aren't 
statistically significant and don't support the null hypothesis.
As additional evidence against it, I'd like to point out that 
Dumbledore has awarded the House Cup to Slytherin for seven years in 
a row without doing anything about it.

However, the sample is skewed, there's no doubt about that, and we 
don't know enough of the track records of other Heads to make 
assumptions of how Hogwarts is run. *If* Dumbledore is biased towards 
his own house, he might not be any worse than former incumbents. Of 
course, the evidence doesn't exclude it, either from the Headmaster 
or the author, but I'm sticking to the old rule that negatives can't 
be proven.

Alshain