How does big-little matching work?
Bigs and littles each submit a ranked list of their top choices. The system scores every possible pairing by how much interest both sides expressed in each other, excludes any pair marked as a conflict, and produces the set of matches with the strongest overall fit across the class. Execs review and adjust everything before the reveal.
Big-little week is the highest-stakes social process a chapter runs, and it is usually decided in a room at midnight with a whiteboard, a lot of lobbying, and one exec trying to remember who said what. The goal of running it as a structured match is not to take the decision away from the exec board. It is to make sure the board is arguing about the ten pairs that are genuinely close instead of reconstructing everyone's preferences from memory.
Step one: both sides rank
Every eligible big submits a ranked list of littles they want, and every little submits a ranked list of bigs. Both lists are private. Neither side sees the other's, and members cannot see each other's, which is the part that makes the process work. When rankings are collected out loud in a room, people rank strategically based on who they think wants them. When rankings are private, people rank honestly.
Rankings are short on purpose, a top few rather than a full ordering of the class. Asking a pledge to rank 60 bigs produces noise after the first handful of names, and the tail of a long list carries almost no real preference.
Step two: mutual interest is scored
Each possible pairing gets a score built from both directions. A big who ranked a particular little at the top contributes a strong signal, a second or third choice contributes less, and no ranking contributes nothing. The same is true from the little's side, and the two are added together.
The consequence is that a pair where both people ranked each other first carries the maximum possible score, far above a pair where only one side expressed interest. Mutual interest is weighted much more heavily than one-sided interest, which is the whole point: a big who is thrilled and a little who is indifferent is a worse outcome than two people who both chose each other.
| Situation | Signal strength |
|---|---|
| Both ranked each other first | Maximum. The strongest possible pair. |
| Both ranked each other, lower down | Strong. Real mutual interest. |
| One side ranked the other, no reciprocation | Weak. Considered, but easily outweighed. |
| Neither ranked the other | Neutral. No preference either way. |
| Marked as a conflict | Excluded. Never paired. |
Step three: conflicts are excluded
Execs can mark specific big-little pairs as conflicts before matching runs. Those pairs are removed from consideration entirely, not merely penalized, so no combination of rankings can produce them.
This exists because chapters have context the rankings cannot capture. Roommate situations that went badly, siblings, people who dated, a member on probation, a standards board matter that has not closed. Handling those as hard exclusions up front is much cleaner than trying to unwind them after a list is produced and people have already seen it.
Step four: the whole class is matched together
Matching solves for the class, not for one person at a time. Assigning the best available big to the first little on the list, then the best remaining to the second, and so on, produces a result that is excellent at the top and steadily worse toward the bottom. Solving across everyone at once trades a small amount of quality at the top for a large gain further down, so the outcome is good for the class rather than good for whoever happened to be processed first.
Where the two approaches disagree, it is usually a case where breaking up one very strong pair unlocks two good pairs that were otherwise impossible. Those are exactly the cases worth an exec looking at, and they are labeled in the report so the board can look at them.
If there are more littles than bigs, the extra littles are not forced into a pairing. They come back flagged for manual assignment, so execs can place them deliberately or assign a co-big.
Step five: execs review before the reveal
Nothing is final when matching finishes. Every pairing arrives with an explanation of why it was made, including how each side ranked the other and whether it was a mutual choice, and the exec board sees a summary of how many mutual first choices came out, how many pairs need manual attention, and which ones are confirmed.
From there the board can reassign anyone. The intended workflow is that execs accept the large majority of pairings without discussion, spend their time on the handful that are genuinely close, and reveal a list they can stand behind, rather than spending three hours relitigating pairs nobody disputed.
Why run it this way at all
Two reasons that matter after the reveal. First, private rankings mean the result reflects what people actually wanted, not what they were willing to say in front of the room. Second, when someone is unhappy with their match, the board has a real answer about how it was decided, which is a different conversation from admitting the whiteboard ran out of space.
Big-little matching is included in every Ghill plan, along with recruitment, chat, events, elections, forms, and points. Pricing is per chapter, per semester.