Lost Causes

Some alternate plans to non-ordered choice never made it off the drawing board. Here are a few:

Non-ordered non-choice--You pick the four houses that you least want to live in. The computer randomly ranks them. It then tries to assign you to one of the other eight houses. If that fails, you are put into the randomly assigned first house.

Vindictive non-ordered non-choice--You pick the four houses that you least want to live in. Then you pick the four people who you would least want to live with. The computer randomly assigns each of them to the four houses.

Publisher's Clearinghouse--Students are mailed applications. If they return them by a certain date, they are entered into a random drawing for room assignments. Early-bird applications are entered into a separate drawing for sweatshirts and Harvard banners. The winners are announced on WHRB by President Rudenstine.

Partial randomization--Twenty-five percent of first-years are randomly selected to be randomly assigned to a random selection of houses. The rest are randomly assigned lottery numbers and randomly assigned to one of their four house choices. If those are full, they are randomly assigned to open space in any house.