"I don't know why they have to have eight. Why can't they have 10 or 12?" says John. (All first-years' names have been changed at their request.)

David agrees. He wanted to block with four of his roommates. There was also the guy next door--his best friend--and the friend from his FOP trip, and three other students who were friends of him and his roommates.

All told, there were nine of them, and they reluctantly sat down to resolve the situation only days before the blocking forms were due.

"We had a really tough night. We had a hard time. We decided to go 8 of us in a blocking group and one person was left out," he says.

David says that, after a long debate, two of the remaining eight felt so bad about leaving one of the students out that they decided to leave the blocking group and join the student who had been left out, splitting his group of friends down the middle.

A Whole New Ball Game

The eight-person cap on blocking groups is a new phenomenon, and the college will not compile data on the makeup of the groups for some time to come.

But again and again, students hypothesized that the smaller size was forcing students into blocking groups that represented only one sliver of their Harvard lives.