Tuesday night’s in-house draw for Suites residences was the first with a “partial fill” option, which resulted in confusion for many residents and residential staff during the three-and-a-half hour room assignment process.

Next year’s Suites residents and staff gathered at Bollard Dining Society in Governor’s Corner for the in-house draw, which didn’t go the way many residents had expected.

“I came in with a group of six and you assume you’re all going to live together,” said incoming Suites resident Jamie Bruce ’12. “But we got split up.”

“People got the option to partial-fill,” said Katie Gardner ’12, who will be a Resident Assistant (RA) in Suites next year. According to Gardner, the new partial-fill option allowed students to draw into certain rooms within a suite without filling up the entire suite with a group.

Last year, students were required to form groups that completely filled a four-, six- or eight-person suite. This year, with partial fill, individuals were given the option of selecting a room wherever there was one space, as long as it was within the category of suites they were assigned to in the Draw.

Gardner said at Tuesday’s draw that this change made the in-house draw process “more competitive,” but in the end, only one draw group was separated.

“They ended up with people they knew and people they liked,” Gardner said.

On Wednesday, though, Gardner acknowledged that the complication of the Draw process came as “kind of a shock” to the incoming staff.

“Most of us weren’t really aware of how big a problem [partial fill] would be until just before in-house draw started,” Gardner said.

Zac Sargeant, an assistant director in Student Housing, was on hand Tuesday to assist with the in-house draw process.

“For the most part it balanced out okay,” Sargeant said. “It took a little more work, but that’s all.”

But some residents were less satisfied with the outcome of the in-house draw. For groups that drew into Suites with a complete group, partially filled suites could have forced a group to split if no empty suites were available.

“The whole appeal of living in Suites was living with a group of girls we had,” said Amy Decker ’13, a member of Bruce’s draw group.  “Now we’re just taking whatever’s left.”

Freshman Kirsten Ornelas’ draw group, which was assigned to a four-person suite, was placed in an eight-person suite with another draw group.

“They didn’t really tell us why it happened, but it seemed like they had just run out of four-person suites and they couldn’t accommodate everyone,” Ornelas wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “The other group almost seemed as lost as us and there was confusion even among the people who were supposed to be in charge.”

Ornelas did not know that being placed in an eight-person suite was a possibility for her group.

“It was pretty chaotic there,” she said.

Ellen Huet contributed to this report.