Houses of Hogwarts
Like many schools in English-speaking countries, Hogwarts uses the House system. The student body of Hogwarts is divided into four Houses, each named after the wizard or witch who founded it. Because students spend nearly all their time at school with fellow members of their own house, this is a very important part of Hogwarts.
Each of the school Houses has a Head of House who exercises additional pastoral and disciplinary responsibilities over his or her House.
Throughout the school year, the four houses compete to earn 'house points'. As a form of incentive or punishment, the achievements or failures of each student — academic or disciplinary — cause their respective house to gain or lose points.
Points are recorded in four enchanted hourglasses located in the School's Entrance Hall. For each point or penalty a student earns, a jewel matching the colour of the house (red rubies for Gryffindor, yellow topaz for Hufflepuff, blue sapphires for Ravenclaw, and green emeralds for Slytherin) will rise or fall inside the relevant hourglass. At the end of each school year, the points are added up, and the house with the most points wins the House Cup.
The award or docking of points is automatically detected by magical means, and adjustments are made to the display in the relevant hourglass. It would appear that for an authority figure to deduct points, they must announce the deduction aloud, otherwise no points are removed.
There appear to be no fixed numbers of points attached to specific actions; this number is decided by a teacher on the spot and may vary greatly.
In the school's early days, students were handpicked by the founders. When the founders began to worry how students could be picked after their deaths, Godric Gryffindor took his hat off and the four "put some brains" in it, so that The Sorting Hat could choose the students instead. Now, at the beginning of each school year, the magical Sorting Hat is placed on each new student's head, during the Sorting Ceremony. The Sorting Hat announces the house that the student is bound to join.
The Hat sorts by judging the qualities of the student and choosing the most appropriate house for him or her.
The hat does not just consider the student's most obvious strengths; it also sees the student's potential qualities, ones that may not have developed yet.
Here is a description of each House :
