Students in residence halls are keeping quiet about changing quiet hours.

Residents who have the opportunity to vote on whether to change the time quiet hours begin, say the vote hardly matters because quiet hours aren't enforced.

Yavapai, Pima and Cochise Residence Halls voted last week, but no hall got enough votes to make a change.

"There is no point in having quiet hours voted on because no one follows them anyway," said Yavapai resident Leigh Laws, a journalism sophomore.

Quiet hours are the time when students must keep their noise to a minimum. They begin at 10 p.m. on weekdays and midnight on weekends.

"It doesn't matter when quiet hours begin, residents are not going to be quiet until they are ready," Laws said.

Mallory Saulka, a family studies and human development sophomore who lives in Apache-Santa Cruz Residence Hall also said there is no point in changing quiet hours because they are not enforced.

"People are screaming and yelling and cackling no matter what time it is. (Resident assistants) are never around to do anything about it," said Saulka.

Leanna Gersten, a psychology freshman and Coronado hall resident said a change would not make much of a difference.

"Moving quiet hours to an hour earlier would be pointless; it doesn't do that much anyway," she said. "People are still loud and inconsiderate."

But Jim Van Arsdel, director of Residence Life, said he was surprised students complained that quiet hours were not enforced, because nearly 1,100 students have been written up for quiet hours violations this year.

More than 5,000 students live in residence halls.

Coronado, where residents have until the end of today to vote to change quiet hours, had the most write-ups, with 353 students documented since August.

That number amounts to half of the 800 students who live in Coronado.

Kaibab-Huachuca hall was the second- highest documented hall with 176 students reprimanded for quiet-hour violations. Hall director Nick Lander said verbal warnings were not effective, so he instructed his staff to be more consistent with enforcing the quiet hours.

"The same rooms were causing problems, so instead of warning them night after night, something needed to be done," he said.

Van Arsdel said students in larger halls are less familiar with each other so they tend to seem noisy, adding that it might seem nothing is being done to enforce the rules when that's not the case.

"It is easy for someone to say that so and so was walking down the hall and was really noisy and he didn't get in trouble. But, because federal law prevents anyone from knowing if that person got written up, it seems like nothing is being done," Van Arsdel said.

Yuma hall, where residents voted last year to begin weekday quiet hours at 11 p.m., instead of 10 p.m., had only five documentations for quiet-hour violations. Residents say there have not been any problems with the late start time.

"They are pretty strongly enforced in Yuma, probably more so than anywhere else. So they should be later because no one goes to bed before midnight anyway," said Emily Kraft, a journalism and theatre arts sophomore.

The idea to let students in residence halls vote on what time to begin quiet hours began before the fall semester, when the Residence Hall Association presented Residence Life with a student-backed proposal.

Voting ends today for residents to shift the block of quiet time by one hour to either 9 p.m. or 11 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. or 1 a.m. on weekends.

A 60 percent voter turnout is needed for any change to be made, a requirement that prevented Yavapai, Pima and Cochise from changing their quiet hours.

"No one has voted, so the issue isn't going to matter anyway," said Farrah Green, a resident assistant in Pima.