Guarenteed matching?
 

What campuses do have guaranteed placement for girls who maximize their options?

I was under the incorrect impression that every campus that used quota additions matched every girl who maximized options, and I know now that I was wrong.

Which campuses do actually promise that PNMs will get a group if they maximize after prefs?

(Is the stopping point for quota additions typically when every group for whom there were unmatched PNM is at total and has been matched with quota additions up to 5% of quota? The other unmatched PNMs are just out of luck and only have COB options just like the girls who SIPed? That seems wrong to me somehow. )

Alabama guarantees bids to girls who go to 3 prefs. At least this is what my daughter was told when she went through in 2001 and what she believed the whole time she was there. (I really do miss working in the kitchen at the DDD house!!!)

An active a Ole Miss told me last summer that panhellenic there won't let a girl get dropped from rush as long as she goes back to every party that she is eligible to attend....e.g., a pnm that gets cut from all but one group after 1st round, as long as she goes back to that one house she will not be dropped...I dont know if this is actually true or not, but I do know that for all the talk about how tough Ole Miss rush is, they have a really high percentage of pnms pledge-- They just may not be pledging the house they wanted coming in.

Pretty much.

Mine didn't have quota additions for maximized options.

I went to a smallish private Northern university. It was a highly competitive recruitment for the kind of school it was, and there were quite a few PNMs left with one or two (out of 3 possible) pref invites who were ultimately not placed after prefs.

That said, we also allowed snap bidding, even if a girl SIPed or dropped out of recruitment. It actually sort of functioned as a "guaranteed placement" system for all PNMs: there was one very small, struggling chapter who was allowed to snap every unplaced PNM whether or not the PNM dropped out or suicided. This sorority's numbers were in the 20s and 30s on a campus where total was usually about 95.

So, the effect was essentially the same... all the unbid PNMs COULD have joined a sorority, had they been willing. Of course, this didn't function like a quota additions where a PNM would be guaranteed a spot in any of the sororities at which she preffed (most PNMs dropped out, unfortunately, had they been left with only this particular chapter for prefs).

This particular chapter has grown in numbers and is a little bit stronger since I left, and I don't think they do the "shotgun snapping" (as their method was called) anymore.

I don't think shotgun snapping is ever really going to work, but what's kind of exceptional about the quota additions thing is that the girls actually preffed and listed all the groups.

So, at your campus, had QAs existed and PNMS preffed that smaller group, the smaller group would have filled up as much as possible just in regular bid matching because they would have listed the chapter. I don't know if they would have seen it through, but girls wouldn't be getting snap bid calls from groups that they didn't even pref.

On a different note, I really love how much Auburn tries to tell PNMs and their families everything that they can. I was looking for information about guaranteed placement, and Auburn doesn't have it either, contrary to my misguided beliefs.

But they tell parents that of the 195 pnms since 1998 who did not match at bid matching, over 160 of them would have matched had they listed all the groups that they preffed.

So basically at Auburn of the tiny number of girls who mismatch, which is less that 3% of the girls who pref, only 18% of that group went bidless after maximizing their options. (.54 of the in the running for bids after prefs?) So over 99% of the girls who list all the groups on their bid cards get bids.

I think that Auburn is being held up as a shining example of how the new release figures and maximizing options work but once again, I'm hearing from various sources that many girls who got their third choice are depledging.

Carnation, I wouldn't be surprised if some do drop.

But to me, unless we have some reason to believe that the girls would have ended up in a group they liked better with another method, it's hard to see how they are harmed by getting bids.

You know what I mean? It's a shame that the new methods don't fix all the problems, but to me, it would be unrealistic to expect them to somehow make the process perfect.

Short of not having quota, I don't see a way that all the girls are ever going to end up in their first choices. And even then, I think there would be girls who wanted groups who didn't give them bids even without limits on numbers.

So..what about the girls who simply aren't suited to sorority life? We all know that Greek Life is exclusive and it's not for everyone. I read these threads like "Weird Rush Stories" and hear about crazy girls, like that one KSUViolet was talking about that cries all the time. Would she still get a bid no matter what if she maximized her options? How is that appropriate?

My understanding is that a woman has to be invited back to have any options to maximize. The difference is between women who chose to leave because they didn't want to attend parties they were invited to, and women who weren't invited to any parties.

Usually you can weed out the crazies before Pref. Remember, every woman you invite to Pref is on your bid list. We had three rounds prior to Pref at my school, and that was usually ample time to get rid of the ones who we've all read about on here.

The way I read it, a woman who maximizes her options at Pref will receive a bid. If she is cut before Pref, then she would not be able to be considered for a QA

I think it is important to keep in mind that strange rush stories may paint a strange picture of the PNM, but it is probably an inaccurate or incomplete picture. To say that girls who occasionally cry innappropriately or make mistakes during rush cannot benefit from sorority membership or cannot contribute to a sorority is wrong. Sure there are a lot of people with personality disorders who probably won't do well in group situations, but there are many women in sororities throughout this system with multiple DSM classifiable psychiatric disorders who contribute a lot to their groups. You never know....the crying PNM may have made a great member of Sigma if she had been given the chance. She (and they) will never know because she made the mistake of showing her emotions too readily.

I'm sorry if it sounded like I meant guaranteed placement all the way though rush. That doesn't sound like a good thing to me. I think chapters should completely be able to release PNMs permanently.

But often the girls invited to prefs are on the bid lists of those groups; it's just a question of where. The groups would want them if they had room.

I'm in favor of saying that quota additions will be available to all the girls who go to prefs who maximize there options.

If there are groups that cut after prefs, the campus would have to address that, I guess.

But I guess what I'm wondering about in this thread is whether any campuses actually say that they will match girls who maximize no matter how many QA that would mean? Does anyone know of any?

I think Alabama does this--I remember my daughter talking about how if you went to three prefs you got a bid regardless....maybe she just didn't understand quota additions, but the whole time she was there she never knew of anyone dropped who had been to three prefs.

I know UC Berkeley did this while I was an advisor there (up until 2006). It occassionally caused some problems when certain chapters got 5 quota additions with a quota of 20, but how else can you guarantee the bid?

But if a girl in only invited to two, she just has to match in regular matching even if she lists them both?

AlphaGamUGAAlum, the University of Kansas Greek Life / Panhellenic site says that they "guarantee":

http://www.kugreek.org/panhellenic_qa.html#18

Will I automatically get into a chapter by the end of the week?
KU has a very low occurrence of women who are not matched to a chapter for one reason or another. The average percentage of women who didn’t match over the last three years is about 4%. While we can’t guarantee that you’ll match to a chapter for the whole week, if you participate in the Preference round (the last round of recruitment) and you maximize your options when you rank the chapters you visited that night, and we will guarantee that you will become a member of one of those chapters.

Note that the PNM has to make it to Preference and has to maximize her options when she ranks after Pref.

I'm not sure if you are asking me, specifically, but at Cal they only go to two parties for pref.

If a PNM has maximized her options all along and only gets invited to one pref party, then my understanding is she is not guaranteed a bid. She must have a full party schedule for prefs and have maximized her options throughout the process to have a guaranteed bid. Someone please correct me, if I am wrong!

I was asking about everyplace. Thanks for answering.

It looks like there are a few campuses that flat our guarantee. And there are others at which a girl who got the maximum number of invites to prefs are eligible (which seems odd to me since it's beyond their control) like Alabama and Cal, and others where they will match some and not others, like Auburn and Georgia where quota additions exist but everyone who maximizes doesn't get one.

It's interesting that there's that much variety.

I suspect I wasn't alone in my belief that quota additions were a reward for every girl who maximized her options, and I was interested in what campuses really do.

Tufts has guaranteed placement. If a pnm is dropped at any point from all three groups, she is invited back to her two favorites. If she is dropped by one group first and the other two later on, she goes to the two she later returned to. If she doesn't match up after pref, she is matched to her favorite. I have seen exceptions, such as one pnm who was so rude to one group that the GA didn't apply this rule to her. But it causes a ton of headaches, and I know at least two groups that have definitely been left with women that were poor fits for their chapters on bid day.

At some point you have to ask what's more important -- making every PNM happy or strengthening the overall sisterhood. Forcing groups to take PNMs they never really wanted isn't the solution!

Speaking as a non-Greek, I fully understand and sympathize with girls who either get bids to houses they're not happy with or, as in my case, don't get bids at all. But by definition sorority membership is exclusive, so we have to expect that not everyone "gets in". Would I have benefited from a system like Tufts'? Of course...but who wants to belong to a group where you know the only reason you're there is because the other members were forced to admit you? No thanks!

Please keep in mind that that's not really the kind of guaranteed placement that most people are talking about.

At most, I think, most people mean that a girl who lists all the groups she preffed on her bid card, not that she gets to choose and the groups have no say.

Groups are usually very interested in the girls that they pref. A young woman can't force her way there at most campuses.

How much difference do you think quota additions make in the 99% number at your campus?

(Depending on who she is preffing, a girl might have a 100% chance of getting one of her three if she lists them all and one group that she lists typically doesn't make quota.)

I find all this stuff really interesting. I really thought quota additions were wonderful, but since I realized that they didn't necessarily benefit all girls who maximized, I'm starting to wonder if using release figures and allowing groups to snap bid to chapter total right after regular bid matching wouldn't work just as well.

Other than the QAs not knowing that they were QAs in a way that snap bids know they were further down the list, what are the other benefits of QAs over snap bids if you were using release figures in both methods?

This guaranteed bid matching is an interesting concept. I don't believe it was ever used at my alma mater, because I always remember some ladies not receiving bids... I will have to ask if they are using this format now. I would imagine the numbers would go up dramatically.

Well, even if they are matching all the girls who maximize their options, there are likely to be folks who ISP or otherwise don't maximize and don't receive bids.

So even with guaranteed matching, there'd be some girls without bids.

Ah, I see... Interesting. I will have to look into this. :)

Did these women know that they were released, or did they show up at bid day thinking that their group wanted them all along?

I'm actually not too sure. I don't know too much about the system at Tufts. It's all totally screwed up though besides this. They've had no GA for a year now, and I think it's making things worse.

GUARANTEED BID AT ALABAMA
 

If a chapter knows that a girl is only preffing their house, wouldn't it be in their best interest to drop her to the bottom of the bid list? She's guaranteed a spot, probably as a QA, so why have her take a spot on the 1st bid list if she'll end up a NM either way?

I guess the trick is in finding out and having enough time to act on it. Usually "what other parties are you going to" is seen as a bad question to ask. But if a chapter decided to ask or otherwise found out, I guess they could ignore any GLO policies they were supposed to follow for bid list placement to do it.

And if the school PC is willing to place her with this group no matter what, it shouldn't make a difference. Moving her down does move someone else up for regular bid matching, but if the group was eligible for QAs, it seems unlikely to me that one particular girl was going to be the only one they had a shot at.

(I think this guaranteed bid only go to girls who maximized options throughout the process, so there's no way (that i can think of) that groups and girls could game the system in advance unless other groups were willing to drop or invite people to help them which seems really unlikely.)