The fate of most West Campus selective living groups hangs in the balance this week as the first full Residential Group Assessment Committee evaluation cycle draws to a close.

Today, we will discuss the RGAC process itself, focusing on the arbitrary nature of the scoring and ranking of living groups. In tomorrow’s editorial, we will critique the mission of RGAC and suggest improvements for the future.

Looking back over three years of RGAC group evaluations, it is clear that the scoring process suffers from inconsistency.

Each selective living group’s yearly RGAC score is composed of a grade in a subset of criteria, which collectively sum to a maximum score of 100. While RGAC defines the criteria, there is no guidance as to how the committee should measure progress within each one, meaning that the scoring is entirely subjective.

This would be acceptable if the same individuals were grading all groups in a single year, because each group would be held to the same set of subjective standards.

But under the current system, only six of the 11 RGAC committee members evaluate each living group. Because there is a different set of people on each group’s scoring panel, there is no guarantee for consistency within each year’s scores.

Questionable scoring practices have huge implications for an RGAC process in which small fractions of a point matter. For example, this year in the small group designation, the difference between groups eligible to “squat” and maintain their current section, and groups that must select a new section in the lottery comes down to as little as .14.

Another problem with RGAC is that its ranking mechanism fails to incentivize good behavior. To determine ranking and housing selection, RGAC separates living groups into three categories based on their size. Although it logistically simplifies the housing assignment process, this policy unfairly penalizes groups with high scores.

For this cycle, the minimum score for a large group to be eligible to squat is 84.76, compared to a minimum of 76.82 for a medium group. This means that Mirecourt (a large group), which earned a 79.27, cannot squat while Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, a medium group with a score of 76.82, can keep its current section. This does not reward Mirecourt for good behavior.

In addition, the punitive measure recently built into the RGAC process is concerning. This year, Campus Council created a policy stipulating that groups more than one standard deviation below the mean group score would be put on probation.

A process to remove living groups with bad behavior is a good thing and should be encouraged, but implementing this rule as the RGAC cycle was nearing completion is inappropriate and could be perceived as biased against certain groups. It is also just as random as the rest of the process—there is merely a .62 difference between Sigma Nu fraternity, the highest-scoring group on overall probation, and Delta Tau Delta fraternity, which is not on overall probation. 

RGAC’s evaluations are fraught with subjectivity and arbitrary delineations between groups. Its scores should be viewed as the product of an imperfect process