GPA requirements vary from chapter to chapter. The national GPA requirement may only be a 2.5, but an individual chapter could require at least a 3.2.

The thing about national requirements is this- they are the rock-bottom, bare minimum that organization will accept. Chapters have the option of setting a higher minimum GPA. So what you will find quite a bit is that XYZ's national minimum is a 2.5, but GF chapter of XYZ will absolutely not accept anything below a 2.8 for incoming freshmen.

You can try telling them your story, but more often than not in my experience, the chapter requirements were absolutely non-negotiable, even though we could technically go lower. It's sad, but true.

The other thing is is that sororities will assume that your GPA will drop from high school. In my experience, most freshman GPAs do drop.

I agree with the other posters- your best chance will be recruitment as a sophomore.

Here's the thing: the members of the chapters on your campus probably won't bring up your grades during round one because way too many girls will be rushing for them to remember your GPA and make that connection when they see you. I'm assuming you won't bring it up because you won't want to draw negative attention to yourself (regardless of your excuse, if you bring it up you'll be known as the girl with the low GPA who has an excuse for everything). When grade cuts are made, they are made because the chapter has academic standards they hold themselves to... your excuse won't matter when a chapter plans to cut everyone with a GPA below a 3.0 or a 2.8 or whatever. I would assume that in an SEC rush you will be cut by most houses very early on if you have a 2.5 high school GPA. Sherbertlemons makes a great comment about GPAs typically dropping... who wants a girl who might be on academic probation spring semester?

I'm surprised that you're attending an SEC school that doesn't post a minimum GPA for recruitment... how else would PNMs know whether or not to bother signing up? I think Auburn addresses the question of how much high school GPA will matter particularly well: https://fp.auburn.edu/greek/grades.htm

I also want to point out that while the above advice may seem negative, it is realistic. We very much want you to go through recruitment if sorority membership is something that interests you.

That being said, there are many factors that can preclude you from having a competitive recruitment, depending on where you are going to school. (You don't have to tell us where, so please don't think I'm trying to pry!).

Grades are the very first thing the sororities look at, so if you are coming in with a less-than-stellar GPA, that will most likely account for cuts in the very early rounds. They don't really care why you don't have a 3.5, because there are plenty of other young women competing for a spot in their new member classes who do have the grades.

Someone who is a "grade risk" is offered a bid as a rarity-- she is the extreme exception, not the norm. She's usually got some high profile title, like an NCAA athlele, a pageant title holder, a triple legacy to the chapter/descendant of a sorority founder, cured cancer, won an Oscar/Emmy/Tony award, etc.

This doesn't mean you wouldn't make a great member, but in a competitive setting, the sororities really don't have to comb through everyone's applications and look at "soft factors" when they have 100+ women with 4.0's, Community Service awards and campus leadership positions on their resumes, recommendations and/or legacy status.

I wish you the best of luck if you want to give recruitment a try-- just know that your grades may cause you to receive heavy cuts early on and to be prepared for this. We have a lot of stickied threads in the forum with basic advice. Read through them and do call your university's office of Greek Life if you have questions about how your university conducts recruitment, the min. GPAs to be considered for membership in each chapter, etc. While the national groups have min GPAs, the collegiate chapters on each campus often have substantially higher GPA requirements to be considered for membership.

Absolutely. We're not trying to be harsh... we just want you to go in with realistic expectations.

At an SEC school, it's difficult to get a bid as a sophomore, but I think it's MUCH more difficult to get one as a freshman with a low GPA. I think you would be more likely to receive a bid if you rushed as a sophomore (assuming you became involved on campus and had a high - as in 3.5 or higher - GPA during your freshman year). It's totally your choice if you want to rush this year, but the reality is that you're probably not going to end up with a bid, especially if you are attending UGA, LSU, Alabama, or Ole Miss (and there are plenty of threads on GC that will help you see why I would say "especially" about those).

I believe it depends on where you are going to school. At Elon (when I was there) there was a min. of 2.5 first semester of college just to register for recruitment. Then it was up to the sororities to determine where their GPA cut off would be -- some stayed with the panehellenic min. and some went a little higher (like 2.7 or even 3.0). I am not sure how a Fall Rush calculates your HS grades into the equation or how the members would even have access to verify your hs records, but I guess its possible. (i.e. Jane Doe writes down on her app. that she had a 3.0 in hs when in fact she had a 2.0 -- how are they going to verify that????)

My guess is through the high school transcript in her admissions packet.

Yeah, I remember signing a paper that they could have access to my GPA.

i think cuteASAbug meant not rushing if money might be hard to come by.

i agree mostly with that statement, but not everything will be mandatory. for instance, you won't have to go to formal, but you will have to pay the new member fee, the initiation fee, a fee for a badge(even if you get a plain, unadorned one)a parlor fee and dues. you won't have to buy t-shirts for every event that offers a tshirt, but in some chapters the cost of tshirts is figured into your dues.

back to the gpa issue, you might try looking on the local websites of the sororities at your school and see if any of them have posted the minimum gpa they accept. if you can't find that on any of their sites, you could call your college panhellenic office and ask them what the minimum gpa is to enroll in recruitment-if there is none, then give it a try.

Yep. There's a spot on the recruitment form for it and Greek Life would send out any "corrections" that had to be made from that master list. Don't lie, you will get caught.

Also, whoever thought it was a good idea to make someone's GPA on a 7 point scale, my calculator doesn't like you.

the asa girls are exactly right.

at fgcu when the pnm signs up for recruitment, she also signs a paper stating that she allows the office of greek life access to her transcript, and the greek life office verifies the grades. we know each pnms gpa, whether she is a freshman just entering college for the first time, or a more seasoned college student.

AT UCF, every chapter would receive a copy of every recruitment application. (At UCF, that's a lot of paper, too!) If any corrections needed to be made, the correction was obvious on the application. They also did it for ACT/SAT scores, too, as I recall.

That generally was not considered too big of a deal, especially if it was only slightly off. Sometimes it's the difference in how the college calulates GPA versus how the high school calculates GPA. However, if it was listed as a 3.0 and UCF corrected it as a 2.0, it would definitely be noticed!

Believe me, I have heard of PNM's getting dropped due to dishonesty on applications. It didn't just relate to the recruitment application, either. Lies on other applications have gotten back to chapters and resulted in the PNM getting dropped.

We all got copies, but we got them as they came in in spurts. Greek Life just sent out a printout of any updates/corrections that needed to be made. My favorite was college sophomores neglecting to include their college GPA in favor of their HS 4.0.

Anyone else ever get guys filling out the recruitment applications? Ours were stored in the Greek Life office and apparently still say "Sorority and Fraternity" on them. I don't know if Greek Life catches more than we see or what but we had two guys my senior year. They both had foreign names that were gender-ambiguous to your average American. Facebook helped out with that one. (I don't think they were trying to sign up for recruitment, just wanting to be notified about fraternity Rush)

I remember a few of those, too. Honestly, maybe I'm just paranoid, but it never even occured to me that they wouldn't check GPAs on stuff like that. It's obviously so tempting to lie.

Actually, I've always wondered what purpose the self repoted GPA has on reruitment applications, since Greek Affairs still had to check them anyways.

From my perspective (that of the person making the spreadsheets) it was nice to have the info to enter as we got each application, making corrections to that later was definately easier than entering all of that later. Particularly since I usually had to convert GPAs to a 4.0 standard, that's not always hard and you get good at memorizing the obvious ones but it can take time.