The Office of Residence Life has reconsidered changing the housing selection process, the point system will remain
By Katie Schleiss
The Department of Residence Life has decided not to change the manner in which housing will be assigned, choosing to forgo plans to move from a point-based system to a lottery.
"This school will keep the original point-based system, meaning the new plan will not be enacted," Mike Walsh, director of Residence Life, said.
The decision came from negative student feedback collected by the Office of Residence Life surveying Resident Assistants, hall council members and students, according to Walsh.
The current system allows students to accrue points based on credit hours, the number of semesters of on-campus living and a return to the same dorm. These points determine the rank of the students, with students with a higher rank choosing their rooms before students with a lower rank.
This also allows upperclassmen to choose their own rooms, while freshmen are assigned their rooms.
Junior Haylee Goode is a Resident Assistant for Mehling Hall and has lived there for three consecutive years. She said that she likes the current system and believes that changing it would confuse people. "I think the original system is simple and not too complicated," ?Goode said.
Goode said that she likes the current system because she believes that it is fair. She said that if the Department of Residential Life could find some way to base the new system off of the factors currently taken into consideration and judge them in the same weight as before, such as how long a student has lived in a particular dorm and the number of credits they have taken, then she would support it.
"I don't think that a lottery system would be fair. There would be no seniority and I think it would make people mad," Goode said. "If they were living in the dorms for three years and couldn't pick the room that they wanted, then people would get pretty frustrated."
Goode said that if students had their heart set on a certain room and then went up and it was already taken, she would imagine they would be upset. She also went on to explain that, in her opinion, the current system allows for the night that rooms are assigned to be streamlined and not pose a big problem.
"It goes pretty well because there is a list that goes up a week in advance so people know their ranking. They know what time to show up and there is little confusion," Goode said.
While the original aim of the proposed system was to simplify and streamline the assignment process and to make it more user-friendly, there was a large number of complaints from students who had misconceptions that the seniority system would be completely abolished, according to Walsh.
"If the students are not interested, then we won't make an effort to carry out these changes that are unpopular with the students," Walsh said.
Freshman Alexandra Dale said se believes that the proposed change to the system would have been beneficial to the school.
"Even though a person may be taking more credits than another or may be getting better grades it does not mean that the person who is not getting those good grades while taking a certain number of credits is not trying their hardest to maintain the grade level that they have," Dale said. "Maybe for them, taking a smaller number of credits than another student means that they are studying all of the time. And so, my theory is, why should that effort go unrewarded?"
There will still be a seniority system for the new campus halls, Fields and Schoenfeldt, which will be completed by July.
The seniority system for these two dorms will only last for this year in order for students who have seniority who are interested in living in the new campus dorms with greater ease.
Walsh explained that anybody who wants housing will get it, thanks to the new dorms, unlike in the past when there was a housing crunch.
