SO. We're voting on packet signatures. Have you even thought about the numbers yet? Maybe you don't realize how ridiculously low these counts are. Hopefully, my little rant here will help you. Or, at least get you educated on what's going on.

What is the Packet Discussion?

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Okay, so maybe you're out of the loop and just getting into this. Time to let you in on it. Currently, in the CSH Constitution, it states that freshmen, when signing a packet, need to complete at least 60% of the packet signatures. The current vote is to have that percentage raised to either 80% or 90%, to encourage people to socialize more at the beginning of the year, beef-up requirements, and, seriously, 60% is pretty low, and the fact that people can't reach it is pretty pathetic. Below, we'll go into detail on the numbers, and let you see how things have turned out over the years, and how low 60% really is.

What does the Constitution say?

To correctly cite the constitution:

Constitution 5.A.3 Introductory Membership Expectations

5.G. If an Introductory member fails to obtain 60% (rounded up to the nearest whole person) of the Resident Members signatures in the Introductory packet, discussed in By-Law V, Section 5.G, said member will not receive use of Computer Science House facilities, as described in 5.A.4, until successful completion of Introductory Evaluations.

By-Laws Section 5.A The Introductory Process

The participant is given 2 weeks complete the following lists, termed the Intro. Sheets: For each Resident member, Executive Board member, and for Fifteen Non-Resident and Alumni mem- bers (in addition to Non-Resident Executive Board Members), list: [...]

Let me explain....

This means that in order to complete the packet, you need to complete the following:

So really, what we should be thinking about, is do we want to change this 60% of Residential Members or do we want to change the total signature completion of the packet to more than 60%.

Due to a slight confusion on understanding, on everyone's part, the rest of this page explains changing the total 60% completion of the signatures in the packet.

So, what about the Constitution's way of doing things?

Yeah, that does change things. Lets see some graphs here.

First off, this means that we are only analyzing the section relating to Residential Members only, making the whole number of freshmen thing more important than ever. Lets take a look at the past four years to see how that would break down.

This makes new numbers for the 60%, right here. Now, you need 60% of the signatures of that blank group on the right of the red ones! Look below for the numbers:

Now to look at what these numbers are with the other requirements of 15 off-floor and all of eboard: With the current 60% debate, where the total minimnum number of signatures needed is 48, both instances above are below that given number. This is yet another thing to consider.

Low you say, What actually is 60%?

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In the Introductory Packet, there are 80 possible signatures. To break this down:

To complete 60% of the packet, that is a total of 48 signatures. Does this sound low to you? 48 out of 80? Lets try to visualize this. If you can do math, 48 < 56. Notice, there are 56 on-floor members. Did you see that? At minimum, the intro member does not need to know every one on-floor. Let's try to put this into a picture. Below displays all the possible signatures (80), and how many need to be filled.

As you can see, out of all the potential signatures, not even all of the on-floor members are required. The intro member doesn't even need to bother getting off-floors/alumni, nor the Executive Board either! I mean, yeah, sometimes E-board members live on floor, but not all of them do.

Now lets say the Intro Member goes about and gets approximately even amounts of each set of signatures. To do this, we will separate the packet into three sections:

From here, we will assume that the Intro Member has balanced out the proportions of which they get signatures. This means they will split the 60% into the same proportions as above. Out of the total signatures, those percentages will be as follows, out of the total signatures: And now to show you, what would that look like? Not like Intro Members balance things out, but just to look at this a bit closer:

Yeah. Not really that much. You can account for the freshmen that decide they're too cool for the packet and won't sign anyone's in the extra spaces at the end of On-Floors. You can also account for those who just hate signing packets and constantly refuse, and/or are really hard for frehsmen to get in that number. Honestly, there aren't that many of them that do that anyway.

SO.... How does this compare to each freshmen class anyway?

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All of you reading this have been Intro Members before, you know how this works. All of them, pretty much, get in a room once they get their packets, and sign each others. This, of course, makes getting the freshmen signatures really easy. Sometimes the freshmen don't do that, but that's really rare.

So lets compare the sizes of the past 4 years of freshmen on floor, with the full 60% of signatures required.

Okay, not so bad. Only a little more than half of the required signatures are Freshmen Intro Members. Just thought I'd let you know that other than meeting eachother, there really isn't much talking to upperclassmen necessary.

How about 80%? How does that stand out?

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80% is one of the higher percentages we are looking at. Let's look at how this number stands up with the requirements. Please note that I have ranked On-Floors as first priority, Executive Board as second priority, and Off-Floors as third priority.

Now we have all of the on-floors, and almost all of the EBoard members. This at least helps the Intro Members know all of their floor-mates, and the people that will be representing them on House Issues. Personally, I feel knowing all of these are rather important.

Let's also look at if the Intro Member acquired the signatures equally as before.

I would say that's fairly balanced, wouldn't you? It's about a majority of each member status.

If you are interested in how the freshmen years add up to the numbers, just look at the previous freshmen graph, and pretend that it has to reach the max number of signatures for on-floor members.

And finally, the 90%. What's that like?

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This was the initial request. This would definitely be a lot more work for any Intro Member to do, comparatively. It could be a good choice, it really depends on your personal opinion of how much the Intro Members need to do in order to be accepted.

Once again, we start off with a basic comparison, setting the priority of On-floor Members as first, Eboard as Second, and Off-Floors/Alumni as Third.

So, we have a few missing off-floor members, which are honestly the hardest for freshmen to get. It's only 8 signatures to miss. Besides, you can also factor in any on-floors that refuse to give out their signatures, etc. Or those that just... disappear.

Now for the equal distribution:

Just a few missing here and there, but you always have to account for those that are really hard to find (for '08 freshmen, remember Miles? yeah just like that).

So... Can you show me these compared together?

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Now its time we put these percentages back-to-back. How do they compare to eachother, anyway?

Lets start off with a priority check, with the On-Floors as First Priority, Eboard as Second, and Off-Floors/Alumni as Third. In this graph, BLUE is 60%, YELLOW is 80%, and RED is 90%.

Then finally, a comparison for splitting them all equally. Same color codes

Conclusion

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Hopefully these statistics have helped you make up your mind on this debate. If you have any requests for more information on this, just ask me (ducktape) and I'll try to get that for you, if possible. If there are any errors, contact me as well.