There is no way for IU to not have a massive drop between rounds without adding another round to the process. And I don't think ANYONE wants that, especially in January in Indiana.

Best of luck to all involved. Getting the popcorn ready for all the drama that is guaranteed to start coming our way. Because everyone at IU wants the Greek system to be what it is, right up until it means girls go unplaced. Then it is wildly unfair, exclusionary, and should be stopped at all costs.

I don't think the parents want the system to stay the way it is, and they're usually the only ones complaining. And much of the time, girls do it to themselves by thinking certain chapters are beneath them. Greek life isn't for everyone, especially Greek life where you're living in for your whole college career. There may be a forced minimum of 50 bids, but are all those members retained through pledgeship or until they graduate?

Obviously as with any university, some chapters have higher retention rates than others. About half of the chapters now have live out plans that can include juniors if the chapter house is full. The chapter houses vary widely in number of beds, so some chapters require 1-2 years, while there are still that require 3 depending on the occupancy rate.

I do think that going from 9 to 3 is quite a jump. I would assume it would be more difficult for PNMs who get their 7, 8, 9 ranked chapters for pref than for the PNMs who get their 1, 3, and 4 chapters back for pref.

Wow, that schedule is brutal. Just looking at it from a logistics perspective, these girls are not being afforded a proper opportunity to eat. They're jamming them through a 13-hour marathon with just one 2 hour and 20 minute break for a combined lunch/dinner?? :eek: Then many of these girls will be sitting for a couple extra hours afterward each night when making their decisions and marking their cards. I hope they're strongly encouraging snacks inbetween rounds, because just eating one meal in 13+ hours for a few days in a row is not appropriate or healthy.

And let's not even mention the fact that classes start up on the 11th. This is a nightmare.

May the odds be ever in your favor

Back on the old days... :rolleyes: we used to come back to campus earlier than the chapters and PNMs do now. We were usually back no later than Jan 3. That gave us time to have all of recruitment completed prior to first day of classes. We had 5 rounds back then, with the first round being held in the fall. In January, we started with 15, then 8, then 5 then 2. It seems like going down from 9 parties to 3 parties is steep, but then again we had a round in between.

We had 5 rounds back before electricity too. With 15 chapters. Positively decadent compared to now. I think we went 15/12/9/5/3.

The splitting up over 1st and 2nd semester is intriguing to me, especially for the huge schools. I'm picturing having a first round EARLY in the semester. Cuts are made and the girls know who they've got. Then they can have some time to see that the list they have is still good (because, you know, they're ALL good) and then be ready to go ahead, not devastated by a shortened list that doesn't seem to have their favorites anymore. Then maybe a second round at the end of the semester and 3 more rounds before school starts? I know it probably wouldn't work, but for that large of a school doing deferred rush I think it would be worth testing. Because my opinion counts. LOL.

Yes, it does! To me! Oh, wait, I don't go to IU and I am old. LOL

Almost forgot to check Greek chat to get caught up on IU recruitment. My step daughter who attends IU is Recruitment VP for her chapter this year. Hoping to get some scoop. :rolleyes:

Can I just say I HAAAAATED coming back that early the year I rushed (back in the Dark Ages)? It felt like I barely got a winter break!

Because we did barely get a winter break! And you'd always start the spring semester sick and exhausted.

I was freaking out about getting my course website finished up by Monday, and then my boyfriend pointed out that classes don't start until the 11th.

Dumb question: How do you force a chapter to take a minimum of 50 NMs?

To take an extreme example, say you have 22 chapters, but one of them (call them ABC) is That Chapter - the WRC with the bad reputation, the one everyone thinks is about to close because they have all of ten actives when all the other chapters are in triple digits, the one everyone wants to drop like a hot potato.

After open houses, every single PNM ranks them dead last. Some PNMs will end up with ABC on their lists (if I understand RFM correctly, that's pretty much inevitable), so they reluctantly return to ABC and again rank them dead last. Same thing happens with the second invite round. Then pref rolls around, and there are some PNMs who still have ABC on their schedule. So they drop out of recruitment, or they leave ABC off their MRABAs. Therefore, ABC matches NO ONE in bid matching. They issue some snap bids, but since the PNMs would rather chew glass than join ABC, none of the snap bids is accepted. So ABC tries to COB - same thing.

So ABC gets penalized because, even though they've rushed their hearts out, the PNMs don't want to join??

I might be wrong about this, so feel free to correct me. My understanding is that the chapters set their own quotas, so I'd guess that the penalty would be for chapter(s) that don't set their quotas at or above 50.

They can tell if that sort of thing happens. I doubt they would be penalized if they followed all the invite number guidelines given to them and just didn't get the expected return rates and therefore didn't make the quota they set for themselves.