  We investigate the delocalization and conductance quantization in finite
one-dimensional chains with only off-diagonal disorder coupled to leads. It is
shown that the appearence of delocalized states at the middle of the band under
correlated disorder is strongly dependent upon the even-odd parity of the
number of sites in the system. In samples with inversion symmetry the
conductance equals $2e^{2}/h$ for odd samples, and is smaller for even parity.
This result suggests that this even-odd behaviour found previously in the
presence of electron correlations may be unrelated to charging effects in the
sample.
