Pref and how it works??

No.

Yeah the system here is dumb. It isn’t about what house you want it’s about how hard houses pref you. That’s why a lot of people for example get stuck with adpi and aopi when they don’t belong there. They score girls the highest possible when they say they don’t wanna be there or they simply don’t fit. Houses have a quota of how many girls they have to take. On pref when y’all pick the house if the house doesn’t meet quota that’s when snap bids are given out. COBs are after bid day and can still happen if houses didn’t meet quota even with snap bids. However, most houses went over their quota which is good but also if you got screwed over by the system you won’t have any options for snap bids or COBs

So what used to happen 30 years ago was that chapters could invite whomever they want each round and PNM’s could accept whatever invitations they wanted. This led to super popular chapters keeping (for example) 600 PNM’s to sisterhood and then dropping 500 of them before Pref. This also led to less popular chapters having 20 PNM’s at Pref when other chapters had 100. At some point the PNM’s had to start returning to all house who invited them if it was less than the # of parties in that round.

All of that was NOT GOOD and led to low %’s of PNM’s getting bids and ultimately a lot of chapters having to close (Alpha APhi, Phi Mu, AGD all closed in the years leading up to RFM).


Release Figures Methodology (RFM) is what we now use. It makes very popular chapters have to cut more women earlier in rush so that those women can consider their real options and not get strung along and crushed the morning of Pref. It also occasionally causes a top chapter to miss initial quota when an unexpected % of their Pref invitees decline the invitation because they ranked 2 other houses higher, thus going into Pref with fewer than expected PNM’s. But honestly that is pretty rare. It’s a little more common for less popular chapters to need to snap because of PNM’s suiciding or withdrawing after Pref.

And to your point about girls who would have fit into those houses getting screwed unless they drop out & can be snapped...

<First I have to say is that 90% of the girls rushing would literally fit into ANY house, top / mid / bottom.>

But behind the scenes, RFM works within a +/- range, so a chapter will be told - for example - they need to cut a range of 70-90 PNM’s after Sisterhood. Based on historical return rates, RFM is prob expecting 80 cuts but you give a flex list in case you have high returns and need to cut more or low returns and need to cut less. The chapter will provide a release list of PNM’s to cut but #s 70-90 will be ranked by number. Like literally, we would cut Suzy before Sally if it got that close but if they both get invited to our Pref we’d be happy to see them. (Side note: This is what we mean by many times the chapters DO love you but it’s all a numbers game.)

These flex lists are in place all week to ensure as many chapters as possible make quota.