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.