2017 bids being wrong

Ah, but the computer CAN be wrong. You're right that it only reflects the data entered, but who enters the data?

Maybe she was a perfect fit for the one she dropped. She'll never know because she didn't take the time to find out. You can't get to know much about a house just from recruitment. She probably missed her chance to be greek.

Look how auburn does it is a computer system that goes through the top ranked girls and then puts them in slots so every sorority reaches the same amount of girls which is declared the quota for the year which is usually around 70 girls or so. So even if the girl in pref wanted to be her big and loved her if she didn't do quite as great in the other rounds and some of the girls ranked her lower then she could've come up as #74 and quota was 73. The computer system also decides who gets let back but it usually doesn't mess up, it depends on rankings from more than just that day it takes into account the ranking from every day of recruitment.

The computer system works in recruitment in two ways. One may be a reason for a big drop in invites called RFM which is used to figure out how many invites a chapter gets to give out to each party (each chapter can have a different number of invites). This is based on their return rates last year (the number of girls ranked high on their list who also ranked them high), so popular chapters who have 95% of the girls they want back also wanting them get far far fewer overall invites to extend each round. Yes, this is the computer's thing, but it also tries to put the heavy cuts in the first two cuts rather than make it to pref and get their heart broken because bids could only go out to a small number of the girls who came to pref. Only 1 house back is a low number which, like someone else said, might be related to grades/lack of recommendations/reputation.

As someone mentioned a PNM never actually drops a chapter. She ranks the chapters and lists top choices but basically no one gets a perfect match, so the others are not dropped but are instead a backup list. But if you pref at a sorority, you will be somewhere on their list, and only recruitment chairs (and maybe presidents or advisers) know where.

Panhel sets quota prior to pref party. Say it's 50. When chapters make their bid lists, all the women who go to pref will be there, but may not appear in the first 50. These lists are submitted by the chapters and Panhel has no control over these.

Panhel attempts to match first choices- say all 50 of zeta's first choice list zeta first, those are zetas bids. If zeta's #12 also prefed at phi mu, lists phi mu first, AND appears on phi mu's top 50, and zeta's #51 lists zeta first, the #12 goes phi mu and #51 goes zeta.

If you pref at 2 sororities, and rank both, you will get a bid to one of them. If you prefed at phi mu and zeta, and ranked zeta 1 and phi mu 2 and were #90 on both their lists but they filled quota by #85, you would go zeta as a quota addition. These are not that common (maybe 2 or 3 a chapter), but that's how they guarantee a bid if you pref and rank both chapters.

Yes there is a computer, and yes the early cuts can be hard. If she wants to try recruitment again she should get to know lots of women in different chapters, make sure her grades are good, and get recs for every sorority.