How does your school handle bidless PNMs on bid day?

[33girl]

There are some systems that have guarantees a woman will be OFFERED a bid if she plays by the rules & maximizes her options. It doesn't guarantee that it will be to a sorority she wants anything to do with.

I think this is different than "guaranteed bidding" where pretty much if someone signs up for rush, even if the groups keep dropping her she'll end up being placed somewhere.

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ad.php?t=57088

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ad.php?t=48395

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...d.php?p=276266

I guess that the rationale behind it is somewhat honorable and trying to downplay the snob factor sometimes associated w/ sororities and rush, but the plain truth is that not everyone is suited for sorority life. Not to mention the particular makeup on that certain campus.

[AlphaFrog]

Originally Posted by 33girl

I think this is different than "guaranteed placement" where they basically say to the rushee, "so, where would you like to go?" and they put her there.

That reminds me of the women that talked about systems that allowed the PNM to go to more parties than she was actually invited to if she didn't have a full schedule, by either alphabeticly assigning her to one, or begging groups to allow her back. Totally unfair to the PNM and the sorority. The PNM gets her hopes up because she's still got a full schedule, when in reality there are only a few groups (if any) actually considering her...and the sorority has girls that think "Why did XYZ invite THAT girl back??".

[audrey5366]

Originally Posted by 33girl

There are some systems that have guarantees a woman will be OFFERED a bid if she plays by the rules & maximizes her options. It doesn't guarantee that it will be to a sorority she wants anything to do with.

I think this is different than "guaranteed placement" where pretty much if someone signs up for rush, even if the groups keep dropping her she'll end up being placed somewhere.

I can't imagine any system with "guaranteed placement" wherever a PNM wanted to go , but I've seen ones where if you play by all the rules and you don't drop groups or SIP and you make it to pref party, you will recieve a bid to a group that you prefed.
It's pretty much a numbers game at that point-- if quota is made up of the number of women who were invited to pref parties divided by the number of sororities than there would technically be a spot for everyone.
Chapters would go below quota if a girl SIP's somewhere else and isn't high enough on their bid list (in this system, EVERY girl at pref party would have to be listed somewhere on the bid list, essentially it would be your top girls until you hit quota and then an ranked second list of everyone else you would love to take if you had unlimited spots) or if a girl drops out without signing a bid card.

Stil, even this system doesn't keep girls from dropping in between rounds if they don't get the house they want or if they get dropped by every house in the process..

Now that I think of it though, what happens if a girl only attends pref at one house but she is at the bottom of their list and enough girls list that house first above her to be placed on that chapters list-- does she go bidless?? She would have maximized her options but gotten dropped from every other house and still go bidless?? Is this the type of thing avoided by the "guarenteed placement"?

[ForeverRoses]

I don't think garanteed placement means wherever a PNM wants to go, however I also remember during rush, it was drilled into our heads that anyone we invited to pref had better be someone we wanted on our lawn on bid day. The way my school worked, after pref all the houses ranked the girls on a first, second and third bid list- no one was really "cut" after pref. So theoretically, even someone on our third bidlist could end up getting a bid from us. So I don't see it as too much of a stretch for garanteed placement if you maximize your options all through rush (I don't agree with someone only going to one pref even if they were invited to 3 just so that they would get a garanteed bid from that one house).

[exlurker]

To clarify – I was thinking of systems like the ones 33girl, Audrey3566, and ForeverRoses have described. As 33girl points out, there’s no guarantee that the PNM will want to accept the bid she is offered. (However, I think there’s a difference – slight, but a difference -- between no bid at all after pref and a bid to a chapter a PNM doesn’t like.)

33girl: “There are some systems that have guarantees a woman will be OFFERED a bid if she plays by the rules & maximizes her options. It doesn't guarantee that it will be to a sorority she wants anything to do with.”

Audrey3566: “I can't imagine any system with "guaranteed placement" wherever a PNM wanted to go , but I've seen ones where if you play by all the rules and you don't drop groups or SIP and you make it to pref party, you will receive a bid to a group that you preffed.”

ForeverRoses: “I don't think guaranteed placement means wherever a PNM wants to go, however I also remember during rush, it was drilled into our heads that anyone we invited to pref had better be someone we wanted on our lawn on bid day. The way my school worked, after pref all the houses ranked the girls on a first, second and third bid list- no one was really "cut" after pref. So theoretically, even someone on our third bidlist could end up getting a bid from us. So I don't see it as too much of a stretch for guaranteed placement if you maximize your options all through rush (I don't agree with someone only going to one pref even if they were invited to 3 just so that they would get a guaranteed bid from that one house).”

[jwright25]

Originally Posted by audrey5366

Now that I think of it though, what happens if a girl only attends pref at one house but she is at the bottom of their list and enough girls list that house first above her to be placed on that chapters list-- does she go bidless?? She would have maximized her options but gotten dropped from every other house and still go bidless?? Is this the type of thing avoided by the "guarenteed placement"?

As long as she was invited to only one Preference and attended it, she will have completed recruitment "in good faith" and maximized her options. So she will be eligible for quota additions. Campuses who utilize the new release figure method can almost always place "good faith" PNMs as quota additions if they did not match through traditional bid matching. Campuses who don't use RFM yet (not that many left) pretty much do whatever they want.

[DeltaBetaBaby]

Guaranteed placement is a bad idea, IMO. If a girl is only invited to one pref party, what's to say that she didn't snub another chapter earlier on? Let's say there are five chapters, and she behaves like a beast at four of them because she only wants to be an XYZ. Hardly fair to let her pick like that and guaranteed her the bid to XYZ.

[KSUViolet06]

We are not a guaranteed placement school, but our placement rate is pretty good.

I'd say if you attend at least one pref, you have a 98% chance of getting bid. Out of about 100 girls attending at least one pref party, all but 2 or 3 of them received a bid.

Those 3 who didn't were all girls who attended more than one pref, but chose to Intentional Single Pref.

I think that guranteed placement goes against the mutual selection process that recruitment is supposed to be.

[jwright25]

Originally Posted by DeltaBetaBaby

Guaranteed placement is a bad idea, IMO. If a girl is only invited to one pref party, what's to say that she didn't snub another chapter earlier on? Let's say there are five chapters, and she behaves like a beast at four of them because she only wants to be an XYZ. Hardly fair to let her pick like that and guaranteed her the bid to XYZ.

That is very true, and I've seen it happen. But as long as XYZ wants her enough to keep her coming back to their parties, it's basically the same result, right? Or perhaps some would argue that it is better this way - rather than continuing to attend parties at chapters that she knows she would never take, she gets them to release her early and then invite someone else who might actually be interested. If XYZ didn't want her, they'd cut her before Preference.

But that does bring up an interesting way to dodge the system. A chapter could dirty rush a girl and tell her to be mean to everyone else to where she gets cut. Then she'd get only one invite to Pref, the chapter puts her at the bottom of the list, and gets her as a QA. Lots of room for problems to happen though - like chapters who are supposed to invite everyone back each night, etc. But something to think about anyway!

[AlphaFrog]

Originally Posted by jwright25

But that does bring up an interesting way to dodge the system. A chapter could dirty rush a girl and tell her to be mean to everyone else to where she gets cut. Then she'd get only one invite to Pref, the chapter puts her at the bottom of the list, and gets her as a QA. Lots of room for problems to happen though - like chapters who are supposed to invite everyone back each night, etc. But something to think about anyway!

I still say that any girl willing to play 4th string like that has problems. If a group doesn't want you enough to put you on their first bid list (or at least high enough that you get a bid fairly) why do you want them?

[aephi alum]

Originally Posted by jwright25

But that does bring up an interesting way to dodge the system. A chapter could dirty rush a girl and tell her to be mean to everyone else to where she gets cut. Then she'd get only one invite to Pref, the chapter puts her at the bottom of the list, and gets her as a QA. Lots of room for problems to happen though - like chapters who are supposed to invite everyone back each night, etc. But something to think about anyway!

That could very easily blow up in the PNM's face, though.

Let's say Susie PNM is Kathy XYZ's rush crush, and Kathy really wants Susie to become an XYZ. Kathy takes Susie aside and tells her that they use guaranteed placement, so Susie should be rude and mean at the other sororities' parties, so she only gets one pref invite, to XYZ, and she will be placed at XYZ, guaranteed.

Susie takes Kathy's advice and is rude at all the other sororities' parties. The other sororities, of course, cut her, and Susie becomes known as "the rude PNM". Other sorority members talk to their XYZ friends and tell them how awful Susie is.

When XYZ's membership selection comes around, there are a bunch of sisters who know how rude Susie was to their friends in other sororities... and Kathy is just one sister. So, Susie is cut from XYZ.

Now, Susie has been completely released from recruitment, and will probably never get a bid anywhere, because everyone will remember her as "the rude PNM" for the rest of her college career.

It's always best to keep an open mind and make up your own mind when accepting invitations and filling out your pref card.

[lauralaylin]

At a school I volunteered at, if a pnm was completely cut by all the sororities, she went back to the ones she liked the most. If she was completely cut again, the same was true. So she basically was able to choose where she ended up. One year we were going to get stuck with someone that was NOT a good fit with the chapter, but because she was so rude to another group, the GA actually didn't honor the guaranteed placement in her case, so we lucked out. So being rude doesn't always work.

[ChildoftheHorn]

Originally Posted by DeltaBetaBaby

Guaranteed placement is a bad idea, IMO. If a girl is only invited to one pref party, what's to say that she didn't snub another chapter earlier on? Let's say there are five chapters, and she behaves like a beast at four of them because she only wants to be an XYZ. Hardly fair to let her pick like that and guaranteed her the bid to XYZ.

I really don't think that happens very often for those cases. Potentially, the sororities could just send that sort of thing to someone's attention. In which case, it would really be right to cut her from all houses.

I am more of the opinion that if a girl went to the effort of going through the whole system, that says something about the person. They are giving it a chance. If a girl has a hard time representing herself, she is making the effort to change (sororities do help social skills). She is also showing that she does have something to offer.

I would say Guaranteed Bid, so long as they follow all the rules and the pledge classes are not too big.

*This would also help some of the stigmas about Greek life give up the ghost.