The Council of Representatives (COR) discussed the home game ticket exchange process during Tuesday's meeting.
Student body president Bob Reish said it is important for COR to review this past year's statistics to see if the program was successful and to determine if it should be continued.
The program allows students to purchase additional tickets to home games.
The process works in two parts. First, students must bring IDs to a designated location 10 days before the home game and attain a lottery number. If the lottery number a student is given is drawn, then the student has the right to purchase one of the tickets available for exchange.
Reish explained there was a maximum of 100 tickets per game in the exchange, a number set by the Ticket Office when the program was in its inaugural year.
The data garnered from the exchange showed students did not always take advantage of exchanging their tickets after they won.
Student body vice president Grant Schmidt pointed out that there have been some concerns over these low exchange rates.
"Some people are concerned that if ticket exchanges cannot even reach 50, why even have the program in the first place," he said.
COR members expressed interest in seeing the breakdown between the usage of the program by undergraduate students and graduate students to see which group had a higher participation rate.
But the data was unavailable because the lottery is run through student's net ID numbers, which do not take into account a student's class year.
Members also made a number of suggestions to help increase the effectiveness of the program.
One of these suggestions was to limit the number of ID's one student is allowed to bring at a time. Currently, one student is allowed to carry up to four IDs in exchange for four lottery numbers.
Another idea discussed was the possibility of selling tickets unclaimed by winners of the lottery to those who did not win. This stemmed from the procedure followed by the Student Union Board (SUB), which hosts the lotteries for away games.
Overall, a consensus was reached that the program should continue.
"Maybe it was not most successful this year, but it may take a few years to catch on," sophomore class president Cynthia Weber said.
Reish added there were a number of factors that possibly contributed to the low participation.
"Two major issues that may have affected the low level of participation in this exchange was the lack of games played during Fall Break and the insufficient advertising of the program," he said.
While the program has existed before, this year was the first year students were in charge of it.
The Council decided to continue to use the same breakdown in groups as they did this year, which included the undergraduate and graduate student body populations, and will look into devising a system to see who is using the exchange.
Also discussed at Tuesday's meeting was the upcoming Intercollegiate Symposium, which will be held March 27th.
Student government representatives from Northwestern, Purdue, Vanderbilt, and Washington University in Saint Louis will be on campus to discuss a variety of topics.
This conference stems from the hope of creating a sort of "Ivy League Council" for the Midwest, Reish said.
The activities of the weekend will take place in the LaFortune Student Center and will include three sessions to discuss topics that range from ways to cure student apathy towards student government to off-campus relations.
At the end of the weekend, a steering committee will examine what else can be done for future conferences.
In other COR news
u Katherine Burke was unanimously approved as the SUB manager for the upcoming year. Burke said she has many new ideas for SUB, including a battle of the sexes comedy night.
