Hogwarts Points System Was Rigged from the Start, and It's Not Dumbledore's Fault
Sure, Albus Dumbledore was notorious for taking liberties with the House points, especially at the end of the year, but he wasn’t the problem: the Sorting Hat was. Kind of.
We’ve all seen the memes about Albus Dumbledore randomly awarding Gryffindor a few million points for existing at the last possible second, haven’t we? The Headmaster was not bothered with trivial matters such as honesty and fair competition when he wanted to see the Grand Hall’s walls red, that’s for sure.
However, he was not the problem, as we can learn from JKR’s interviews and notes: the issue was that the point system at Hogwarts was rigged from the start. Let’s see.
According to Rowling, the “original forty” — the personalized students with actual names — were not the only students in Harry’s year; they were merely the ones she could mention by their names. In reality, there were around one thousand students attending Hogwarts simultaneously, and that number was fluctuating.
But that’s not the issue.
The issue is that the Sorting Hat is not supposed to send even remotely equal numbers of students to each House. It judges first-years by their inner qualities and aspirations, and it doesn’t care whether Gryffindor ends up with 100 students or just five: it’s not the Hat’s job. It’s no one’s job, actually, as no one cares about it.
And sometimes, some Houses do end up with a dramatically larger or lower number of students than others. The “original forty” aside, it was pretty much confirmed that Gryffindor only had five boys in Harry’s year — five against the thousand or so in the entire castle! Of course, there was no chance for the points competition to be fair.
Seeing how every year, an unpredictable number of students is sent to each of the four Houses, the point system is really, really stupid. There’s nothing honest about having a House with 100 students compete against a House with 450 students.
Albus Dumbledore, being the Headmaster, was well aware that in Harry’s year, there were many Slytherins and next to no Gryffindors, so when the year was nearing its finale, he made sure to throw in those extra points to Gryffindor for Harry and his friends’ extracurricular activities, so to speak. Not a big deal, considering the odds.