Although the House Cup is one of the more coveted prizes in the Harry Potter series, it’s fair to say Hogwarts is pretty willy-nilly when it comes to dishing out the points that determine the cup’s winner. For the most part, it just seems like Dumbledore will come up with any excuse to make sure his beloved Gryffindor takes home the award at the end of the year. Thankfully, an impressively detailed infographic from the official Harry Potter site Pottermore allows fans the chance to do an in-depth examination of potential point fraud in the Hogwarts system. And it turns out the whole thing is kind of a mess.
The infographic breaks down the numbers by both book and character, documenting all of the points that are given or taken throughout the series. Chamber Of Secrets and Order Of The Phoenix are the only two books in which more points are awarded than taken away, though Sorcerer’s Stone just about breaks even. There are no points involved in Deathly Hallows, which makes sense since it doesn’t take place at Hogwarts. But weirdly, there are no points awarded in Goblet Of Fire either, while 90 are taken away.
The breakdowns by character are where things really start to get interesting. Dumbledore is the most generous point giver (+570), while Snape is the least generous (-287). But the single biggest deduction comes not from Snape, but from McGonagall, who takes away a total of 150 points when she catches Harry, Hermione, and Neville wandering around after hours. Still, those 50-point individual deductions are nothing when you consider Dumbledore awards a whopping 200 points each to Harry and Ron after they save Ginny from the Chamber Of Secrets. And to be fair, Snape regularly issues 50 point deductions, too.
The last portion of the infographic is a detailed person-by-person points map, which is where the real data analysis goes down.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harry is the single biggest points collector in the series, with 350 to his name. Ron comes in second with 310, while Hermione is third with 210, which is more impressive when you consider she didn’t have the 200-point bump for saving Ginny and had to earn her points little by little. However, Harry also has by far the biggest points loss in the series, too, costing Gryffindor about 260 points over the years. Weirdly, that means the character with the most net points by the end of the series is Ron, with about 202.
If there’s one thing the graph proves, it’s just how Gryffindor-centric the Harry Potter series is. In both points awarded and points given, it absolutely slaughters the other three houses. Presumably, the students in Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff are having their own unseen points sagas throughout the series (some of the house cup competitions are pretty close by the end). But until J.K. Rowling rewrites the books from Ernie Macmillan’s point of view, we won’t know for sure. Here’s the full infographic for further inspection: