Student Population, SOLVED (sort of) WAS Re: MuggleNet - Godrics Hollow Theory.

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 163697

Carol earlier:
> > The number of students in Harry's year (and Hogwarts) also seems
to increase significantly in GoF and especially OoP from the 40 for
Harry's year (or roughly 280 for the school) in earlier books.
><snip>
> Now, consider the students named in the sorting ceremonies, even
JKR's notebook, to be loosely equated with which "few characters" we
"follow"* while the seating for thousands etc are the "backgrounds and
wide angle shots".
<snip>
> 
> It's telling that _everything_ that goes to numbers at all, from the
> seating arrangements to the crowded hallways in a seven-story
castle, points to there being many more students, teachers, elves,
etc, than are ever shown by name or face.
>

Carol responds:
But SS/PS quite clearly shows twenty brooms for the combined
Gryffindor and Slytherin flying class. We have "about" twenty ear
muffs for the combined Gryffindor and Hufflepuff Herbology class in
CoS (Professor Sprout takes the last pair). We have eight Boggarts,
not counting Lupin's, one for each Gryffindor student except Harry and
Hermione (if the cockroach is a boggart instead of Lupin's way of
making his ridiculous, we have eleven Boggarts). There definitely only
five boys in Gryffindor in Harry's year; we know of only three girls,
but JKR in an interview concedes that there are two more whose names
she's forgotten. So all of the houses we know of in Harry's year have
either exactly ten or close to ten students (five boys and five
girls). There's no reason why Ravenclaw wouldn't also fit the pattern.
We also know that there are exactly twelve teachers, one per subject,
six men and six women. If Hogwarts had more than about 280 students,
it would need more teachers as well.

And yet JKR shows an impossibly large number of students watching the
TWT and some of the Quidditch matches. The discrepancy shows up most
clearly when Umbridge's DADA class, which so far as we know consists
solely of Gryffindors, swells to thirty or so students. The
discrepancy distracted me so much on a first reading that all I could
think was "Flint!" 

I think that at one time, before the first Voldie war, for example,
Hogwarts may have had more students and a lot fewer unused classrooms.
And yet in Severus Snape's student years, there seem to have been only
*four* Gryffindor boys. (If there had been more, I doubt that PP would
have been part of their little group).

at any rate, I'm not going by the Sorting ceremony (which omits Crabbe
and Goyle, among others). I'm going by the solid evidence of brooms
and earmuffs and the like in the early books. The ten students per
class in Harry's year in JKR's notebooks match the canon evidence
perfectly for the first few books, but the numbers slip into
inconsistency after that.

BTW, isn't it interesting how a thread on Godric's Hollow can morph
into a debate on the number of students at Hogwarts?

Carol, still convinced that there are forty students in Harry's year
and similar numbers of students in other years