Recruitment at a small Alabama School

[violetpretty]

Originally Posted by Jen

D obviously had her on their first list, while A had her on the second list.

As simply as I can explain it ...

Each sorority has a list with the girls on it that they most want to match with in alphabetical order. The number of girls on the list will be what quota is (so if quota is 20, there are 20 girls listed).

They also have a second list that lists, in order of preference, girls that they would also like to match with who are not on that first list. (These two lists will be the names of everyone who attended their preference parties)

They will read out Jane Doe's first choice. She wants sorority A. She will match with them if she is on sorority A's first list. If she isn't, the card is put aside until they go through all the other PNMs doing the same thing with their first choices.

If it WAS a match, and sorority D had also had Jane's name on their first list, they have to cross Jane off, because she went elsewhere. Sorority D now has 19 names on their list. To bring it up to 20 again, they'd take the first name from list 2 and put it on list 1. Every sorority that didn't get Jane does the same if she was on their first list.

All the PNMs who don't match to their first choice the first time around are read a second time. The reason for this is that if sorority A had her on their second list, she may have moved up to the first list now because other girls they wanted matched elsewhere. So if they read her first choice, sorority A, and she's now on their first list, she'll match there.

This process is repeated until she doesn't match at A. She may not match because A got 20 girls (quota) before her name made it to their 1st list.

So now they read her second choice, sorority D - same process. She will match if she is on sorority D's first list.

If she was on sorority D's second list, and she didn't match at this point, they would continue the process (with her and all the other PNM cards) reading the choices until everyone is matched (or, in rare cases, someone might not match at all to anywhere).

So what happened was your sister was on the second list for sorority A. Her name did not make it to the first list by the time sorority A reached quota. Her name WAS on sorority D's first list by the time they had to read all of the second choices (whether it was on the first list right off the bat or on their second list and moved to the first because of other girls matching elsewhere is unknown ... if she was clear to them she wasn't interested, she may have been low on their second list and made it to the first because other girls on D's first list matched to other groups. So they may have been honouring her choice of being elsewhere by ranking her low on the 2nd, and she made it to their first anyway, by virtue of A filling up quickly). Therefore, she matched to D.

Correct except for the bolded part. It should say, "by virtue of PNMs of chapter D's list matching elsewhere or suiciding."