Guaranteed bidding
 

Hi everyone!

I've been reading the posts with interest and have a question about your individual schools...

Does your school have guaranteed bidding?

What this means is if the PNM rushes and accepts the maximum number of houses that either is allowed or accepted (if she didn't get the maximum number to ask her to return), that at the end of Recruitment she will be guaranteed a house someplace (even if it's not her first choice)...

When I went through Rush years ago, we had this...if you "suicided" (which I did and was VERY lucky not to have been cut!), there was no guarantee of getting a house.

The campus I currently advise at also has the guaranteed bidding policy...

If your campuse does/doesn't have this policy, how do you feel about it?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!!:)

I don't think we had it. I'm not sure I understand it though. To me it seems like all it does is prevent cross cutting. If you attend all the events that your invited to, including pref, your guranteed a spot in a house. It would make no sense to place you in a house that you did not pref. So if you attended pref at the house, and did not decide to SIP, you likely would agree to be a NM in that house. If they invited you to pref, your very likely on one of their bid lists. Unless there's something I'm totally missing, I see no downside to this policy!

They purpose of this is so every girl gets a house if they accept all invites extended to them...it's to reduce "suiciding" and to maintain the quota number set by NPC.

Basically it would go like this...

Suzy Rushee is invited to AXO and Pi Phi as her last two Pref. night parties. She attends both parties, but upon returning to rank her bid card, She puts AXO as her first choice and decides NOT to put down Pi Phi because she doesn't want their house.

AXO decided NOT to put Suzy Rushee on their first preference for bid list. Because Suzy did not put down Pi Phi on her bid card, she now is not extended a house at all!

On the other hand....

Suzy Rushee goes to both parties and signs her card as 1. AXO, 2. Pi Phi...regardless if both houses put her on their 2nd-choice list, because she attended both parties she will be guaranteed one of these two houses....(provided she also attended every invitation allowed to her up to this point)...

Hope this clarifies things a bit...

Somewhere either on this forum or Greek Life, we've discussed this before but I can't locate it.

Guaranteed bids could be great as long as every sorority follows the rules so that ABC doesn't "accidentally" ask back twice as many PNMs to prefs as the other sororities. Then all of a sudden, there are all these unmatched girls after bid matching and ABC says, "Whoops! We screwed up. (innocent looks) We know quota was 30 but here are all these girls who only came to us for prefs so we'll be taking 50 in our NM class."

My school does guaranteed bidding for formal rush. The way it works is that every rushee who turns in a preferential list is guaranteed a bid to a sorority, although it may not be her number one choice. I think that guaranteed bidding is a good thing, however you do have to be careful of it. This past recruitment, I was a Rho Chi and we and the VP of Recruitment told the rushees several times that as long as they turned in a preferetial list, they were guaranteed a bid. However, when they did bid matching, it turned out that because of the way it worked, 3 girls ended up not receiving bids at all. The girls were called and told that they were eligible for open bid, and one of them did open bid. We (the Rho Chis) felt bad for those girls though because we did originally tell them that they were going to get bids.

IU doesn't have guaranteed bidding. It's a numbers thing. There are way more PNMs going through than spots available so there's no way they can do it.

I think it is a bad idea. It just makes the bigger chapters bigger and hurts small chapters.

i want to say yes for my school. as long as you go to the maximum # of sororities and put more than one on your preference and bid card, you will get a bid to somewhere

I know Tufts Univerity does it. Its called General Assured Bidding. If a woman is released from all three groups she is automatically invited back to them all. This happens all the way through pref. Then if she still doesn't match the advisors sit around and discuss (umm argue) about how gets placed where. Its a university thing and rather unpleasant when there are only three groups involved.

That is an absolutely horrible rule. If a girl is dropped from all houses then she should not get a bid!

Oh my goodness -- I agree. That's one of the most terrible ideas I've ever heard.

There's also a thread on the Tufts situation on the Rush or Greek Life forum somewhere. I'm pretty sure we all agreed it was horrendous and frankly, I can't see how a school could force nationals to go along with that!

I distinctly recall posting that I could just picture the sororities fighting over who would and wouldn't take the girls who had been cut--"I'll trade you the 2 skanks for the drunk" or something like that.

This is correct. IU does not use a traditional quota/total system.

My school does not have guaranteed bidding. It's possible, though rare, that a PNM could maximize her invitations, be invited to prefs, sign a pref card, not ISP, yet not get a bid.

On the one hand, I'd hate to be the PNM who attended two or three pref parties, didn't ISP, thought everything was going swimmingly, only to turn up on bid day and be sent home bidless. On the other hand, I'd hate to see one or two sororities ignore release numbers, invite a bunch of people to pref, then say "gee... all these people were invited to our prefs, 50 of them didn't match anywhere, we can't let them go home disappointed, so we'll take them" and have much larger NM classes than everyone else. This is why release numbers are important.

I, too, disagree with the Tufts system. What if a PNM is released from all groups because of grades? What if she's just a total nightmare? Sounds like trouble.

I agree that this sucks, but sometimes these women end up happy in another chapter. There is a reason quota additions are supposed to be limited to 5% of quota.

Besides, with guaranteed placement, I could decide on day 1 that I want to be an XYZ. I am a huge bitch at every chapter except XYZ, and I get dropped everywhere else. So I get one pref invite, I attend, and I am guaranteed a bid to XYZ. I haven't exactly maximized options, have I?

And folks, this would happen at a lot of schools I can think of. Really.

As an advisor, I see a lot of PNMs do this or will blatantly say to my collegiates, "I just want to be in XYZ (not our house). I'm just going to all the parties so I don't get dropped."

Pretty pathetic if you ask me...and what's sadder is that the PNM may not really "fit" with that house...and now has been dropped by all other houses...

I know the Rho Chi's address this, but you can't force a PNM not to do this.

I don't think they could force a sorority to bid a girl who has a 2.2 if their required is a 2.5...unless the sorority just takes it and shuts up, in which case I'd really worry about where their values were.

I'm thinking of those women who do maximize their options, don't decline any invites they don't have to, haven't focused their attentions on only one sorority and been total b!tches everywhere else, but just happen to fall out at the tail end of the second bid list of each sorority they pref. Someone has to be the last person on the bid list. It does suck that they go bidless, but there are snap bids and COB - not getting a bid during FR isn't the end of the world.

I should note that my school does use quota additions to try to place at least a few women who don't match via regular bid matching.

So what is the worst that happens? You go to COB events for chapters that were not in your top three?

At my school I don't think you were guaranteed a bid, but it you attended a pref party for an org, I think you had to be on their bid list somewhere. B/c I remember the biggest cuts came b/f prefs b/c you might get that last girl on the bottom of your second list, running to you on bid day.

Creigton is the other school that I know of that has true guaranteed placement (like Tufts). A lot of other campuses have what they call guaranteed placement which is really that if you maximize your opportunities and attend at least one preference party you do not get cross-cut. This sometimes leads to quota additions, but in the end is more fair to the PNMs.

From what I heard Creighton is bagging their guaranteed placement...too late, unfortunately for the chapter who got screwed by it.

I agree with DeltaBetaBaby. The big just get bigger...

It amazes me how at some schools, say quota is 20, some sororities end up with 26 girls, while another ends up with 12. Quota additions is one thing, but jeez, to get so many over quota just doesn't seem right to me. I always assumed it was this rule that made that possible.

then what is the point with recruitment? why dont the sororities set up tables and all the PNMs just go up and sign where they want to join no matter what the sisters say??:confused:

Tufts requires a 2.5 just to rush, so there shouldn't be total grade disasters in the pool.

I understand why Tufts does this, but it seems to me that they could have a middle ground of some kind...the automatic invites back, at least to interim rounds, when a girl is dropped completely makes some sense to me. Forcing you to take someone who was rude and obnoxious and who is going to drive other members out of the chapter makes no sense to me.

I didn't think that was allowed. I understand that girls can put down whomever they want, and rank them. But becuse they go to preference, that doesn't automaticlly mean they are in.

But alot of this forum is confusing me. Isn't "rush" and "pledge" non-NPC?

Technically you're right. "Rush" and "Pledge" are outdated terms...kinda shows off our age, huh?

Also, depending on the house, you're also correct that an invitation means "We're interested in you as a sister." And it also means that is she comes to Pref, you must expect that she'll be a NM on Bid Day...However, the fact that there will (hopefully) be more PNM's than quota, there's no guarantee that she'll be there the next day unless she is on your #1 Bid list.

Paging DeltaBetaBaby!
 

Illinois "does not use a traditional quota/total system." What does that mean? What do they use instead?

That's how it's been at my school as well ... we've been having about 100 start out and maybe 85 or so attend pref... and those that we lose drop themselves (I think only 2 or three people weren't on a pref list and I know one of the girls that was cut from all three chapters with DAMN good reason) most people get bids.. even if it's not first choice.

It's my understanding that they've said that before, but it hasn't happened.

Re: Paging DeltaBetaBaby!
 

Not Illinois, Indiana. Not my school, and I am sure someone else can explain it better, but different chapters are meant to be different sizes based on housing.

Re: Re: Paging DeltaBetaBaby!
 

Chapters at IU self-limit based upon the size of their houses. If they have 20 seniors graduate, they they will take 20 new members the next year (I'm making up the numbers but the gist of it is that each chapter votes on the number of bids they will give). They do not use quota/total-- if they simply used the standard quota methods, chapters would easily be twice the size they are now because so many women go through recruitment. So yes, women going through recruitment at IU know there are far more participants than there are bids that will be available. As to why there are not more groups on campus, I would guess that it has to do with housing availability/ costs-- I don't know if there has been expansion discussion, I've only been privy to discussions about the concept of self-limited recruitment (and IU is not the only campus that does it.... unless something has changed recently, Ohio State does as well)

Wow -- I've never heard about that. Do you know why they choose to operate that way? I'm wondering why at some campuses (like Ole Miss), the chapters just get gigantic if the system can't expand, while IU would choose to instead limit the number of women who can be Greek.

That's pretty awful...seems like there ought to be room for these women somehow.

That seems odd to me as well. Aren't there almost always many women who don't want to live in the house?

ASA was there for a while in the 1990's (91-97 or somewhere along those lines) and part of the reason the chapter flopped is because we didn't have a house. Apparently there living in the house = being Greek. I know that at some schools going Greek is looked on as a good option primarily for the housing factor. Whether that's true at IU, I don't know.

I agree that living in the house is really important to some people -- but then on the other hand, sometimes it's a huge battle to keep a house filled. It seems like a difficult balance.

dakareng is correct, the reason there aren't more chapters at IU has everything to do with housing or lack thereof. I think the IU PHC has a rule that a chapter can only expand if they will be able to build a house within a certain amount of time. (Maybe someone who was actually in a house at IU can verify this!) There doesn't seem to be any such rule that applies to fraternities, so that explains why several have colonized or recolonized in the last five or so years, while the only successful recolonization of a sorority in that time was AOPi, and they bought the old KDRho property and built their new house there. All the houses are ginormous and it probably takes quite a bit of money to keep them up. Thus, every sorority at IU has a residency requirement of 2-3 years, depending on the chapter...at least they did when I rushed. (It's not a question of if you want to live in the house, you're going to live there...and all PNMs know this going through.)

When I rushed in the early 90s, four sororities were housed in one of the dorms: ADPi, AXiD, ASA, and Tri-Sigma. The first two had land and were able to build houses in that time...therefore they're still around. The second two did not and I think that was a big part of the reason they folded. After all, the point of going Greek for many people was to get out of a dorm, not to stay in. :) Several fraternities have been closed down by the university since then but I think their nationals still own the houses. The old AOPi house was sold to IU, as were some other former Greek houses, and the old Sigma Kappa house was sold to Pi Kappa Phi.