grade question
 

ok so I have a 2.5 hs gpa, average to above average involvement in hs activities, and same with community service, but I did fairly well on my ACT and SAT. The reason for my gpa in hs is that i worked the entire time and i went to a competitive private school. I plan on going through formal recruitment this fall at a fairly competitive sec school and I was wondering if I should write some sort of letter to supplement my application explaining my grades, get stellar recs, or forgo recruitment altogether? please help! thanks

dity?

sorry but what does dity mean?

I'm going to be brutally honest: I'm from a laid-back, NW not very competitive school. And with grades like that, you would probably be lucky to get a bid here, IMO.

Chapters will see it like this: if you got a 2.5 in hs (which, for all intents and purposes is pretty easy), what will you get in college? How will you hurt (or help) the chapter?

Good luck, but you better come up with some darn good reasons you have a 2.5.

It's always worth a shot, you know, but don't get your hopes up for a dream recruitment.

I'd agree that your chances are slim. If you got a 2.5 in high school, chances are that your grades will be even worse in college. You worked in high school? Big deal, the majority of teenagers have a job in high school, and a lot of people have a job in college. Working isn't an excuse for poor grades- it shows a lack of time management.

I would suggest that you start college, get some decent (i.e. better than 2.5) grades and get your time management figured out, then rush.

what is the minimum gpa required to enroll in recruitment at your college?

I would wait a semester (if they do COB) or until next year. The "reasons" why you had poorer grades won't fly. There are countless women who have great grades, do many activities and who work. Sadly, you will fall to the bottom of the pile and maybe hope to be one of the few scholaship risks a chapter might take.

Take time to build yourself up. Pledging and being an active takes a LOT of time, and if you couldn't hack going to school and having other responsibilities in HS, then how will you do it in college?

Good luck on your journey.

I echo everyone who said to bring your grades up, then rush.

You are in school to get an education first, not join a sorority.

I'd say that the University of Kentucky is a slightly competitive SEC school & even our high school GPA requirements for each chapter are a 3.0 minimum (Sigma Kappa is 2.8 minimum.) If those are UK's GPA requirements, I'm sure that any other competitive SEC recruitment would be the same or higher!

thanks lisa.

i was trying to "gently" lead the poster to understand that her gpa might be too low to rush, without finding the info. for her(not that i know what school she will be attending). she should know that info., but it seems that time after time, girls come on here not even knowing what the minimum gpa is to enroll in recruitment at their school.

when they do find it out, rushing becomes a moot point, because their grades are too low.

did she say she was attending an sec school? i am surprised that she could get in with a 2.5., unless she knocked the top out of the sat and act tests.

if you wait to rush as a sophomore, you will need to have good grades(think b average or higher) and you need to have gotten involved on campus in an organization or 2, as well as done some volunteer time.

I was surprised at that, too, FSUZeta. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's not UGA... unless you're going to be an athlete there, chelc8807.

chelc8807, I'd like to be nice and tell you to give it a shot, but it's unlikely that it's going to end in anything but heartache. SEC schools have plenty of PNMs with higher GPAs who attended competitive public and private schools and didn't consider that an excuse to have a low GPA. Even though it's also unlikely to get a bid as a sophomore, I think your odds will be better if you work your butt off as a freshman and then rush with a good college GPA.

But as others have said, you're there for an education, not a sorority. If having difficult classes was a struggle for you in high school, then what makes you think it will be so much easier in college? Take time to adjust to collegiate academics before adding in more activities.

i know this still isnt an excuse but when i say worked all through hs i mean i worked 35 hours a week

That's an amazing accomplishment and not to make less of it, but it still won't change anything at recruitment. Grades are paramount, and cuts made in the early rounds of recruitments are specifically related to grades.

The gpa requirements aren't listed on the schools recruitment page, and I've been looking on the national pages to find requirements. Most of them I'm right at or right above, thats why I was aking if I should even rush. As for time management I'll have alot less responsibility in college than I did in hs for various reasons.

This is going to sound really snobby, but I don't care. When you say you worked all through HS, was it because you wanted to or because you needed the money? The reason I'm asking is because sorority life is expensive anywhere, but especially so in the South. Your new member semester is crazy, I think my mom is still in mild shock from it. Sorority costs are more than just dues, it's buying gifts for your big/little, event t- shirts, mixers, formal tickets, formal dress, etc. Your GPA already makes you not a very strong candidate, and if money is a problem, I would recommend rushing, because you may end up feeling left out.

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.

I was just curious how panhellenic got grades from hs.

We had girls lie on their applications all the time. There was a rumor -- every year -- that no one checked. Believe me, everyone checked (on grades, legacies -- we even had one girl who was a transfer and claimed she hadn't accepted a bid at her former school when in fact she had and had been initiated!!!! :eek: ) And for the girls who did get caught big time (like saying they had a 3.5 when they bearly had a 2.0 and the girl who actually was a sister in another GLO not on our campus were of course asked to leave recruitment. Our big problem was that Winter Term grades often weren't posted before recruitment began so if you ended up flubbing your winter term course you could get half way through recruitment and get pulled for grades. Or in the alternative have the bear minimum to rush, get released from houses with a higher minimum and then your winter term grades posted and you could have actually rushed those groups. I hope that they have fixed this system by now it caused pure chaos!!!!

I just talked to the Panhellenic Office at the school and they said 2.2 is required, but most prefer a 2.5 or better. just to keep y'all posted.

At my first school, where I pledged an NPC sorority, initiation was held the first week of the following semester to make sure that only pledges with high enough GPA initiated. This was in the early 90s, and I am not sure if they do that anymore, but that is how it was done then. (I left school the last week of the semester due to health, and was depledged).

There was a girl in my pledge class who did not make grades the semester before, and pledged two semesters in a row. She didn't make grades the next semester either, and she was dropped.

Really? That sounds very low for an SEC school. While you are above the minimum to go through recruitment, you'll still be a "grade risk" at every chapter and will face early cuts.

If you really are serious about joining a sorority, there's nothing to lose by going through in the fall, because you can meet women from all of the chapters and learn more about Greek life at your school. I highly doubt you'd get a bid, and even if you did, you might not want to take it since you'd probably want to focus on getting good grades first before you add tons of activities in the mix.

After your first semester, all that matters is your college GPA. So if you do well, you will make yourself a much better candidate for informal recruitment in the spring or fall formal as a sophomore. Since informal recruitment can be about having connections to sororities, it might not be such a bad idea to go through this fall just to meet people.

JessSigKap,

The min. is not necessarily the norm, though. For example, when I was in undergrad, you had to have at least a 3.0 to be considered for acceptance into my major. In reality, the cut-off for those who were actually accepted was a 3.5.

I'm wondering what school this could possibly be because, as jesssigkap mentioned, 2.2 seems very low for SEC. Of course, adpiucf is absolutely right that taking a girl with the minimum is rare... why take a girl with the bare minimum when there are PNMs with much higher? OP, I'm not trying to guess where you're going; please don't think I'm asking you to tell us.

Here's what's available online for the SEC schools. It seems a lot of schools don't post an "official" required GPA. I wonder how this could hurt PNMs who don't know how much a low GPA could hurt them?

Alabama - none listed. Bama is known for having one of the most competitive recruitments, though, so even if a PNM can register with any GPA a low GPA would equal an early cut (although they don't list official chapter minimums on the site).

Arkansas - 2.5 required to participate.

Auburn - none listed. Site specifically states that PNMs with GPAs below a 3.0 will be unlikely to receive bids.

Florida - none listed, but UF has become very hard to get into... it would be rare to get into UF with a 2.5!

Georgia - none listed, but it's also very hard to get into UGA... it would be rare to get in with a 2.5 high school GPA.

Kentucky - no official GPA required to participate, but in recruitment info they list 2.8 as required for one house and 3.0 for all the others.

LSU - 2.75 required to participate.

Ole Miss - no official GPA required to participate, but in recruitment info they list chapter requirements between 2.6 and 3.0.

Miss State - 2.0 required for upperclassmen, nothing listed for underclassmen. Chapter GPAs are much higher.

South Carolina - none listed, but chapter GPAs are all very high (most above 3.3), so I can't imagine anyone taking a grade risk.

Tennessee - none listed, but FAQs mention that the average sorority member has a 3.1 GPA so it can be assumed that similar qualifications are expected from PNMs.

Vanderbilt - Deferred recruitment (no GPA listed), but I can't imagine someone with a 2.5 getting into Vandy.

Some people may also get into a more competitive university with a lower GPA due to several factors-- legacy, AA, athletics, etc., which at the end of the day doesn't matter b/c they're in at that school and that in and of itself is a huge accomplishment :)

I'm a little uncomfortable with this since it breaks the "don't out the PNM who doesn't out herself" rule. I agree that I don't quite buy it, but I think this pushes it.

I wouldn't have posted anything about school requirements if anything would have given away the PNM's school. Since most of the schools don't list anything specific and none list a 2.2, all we know is that the PNM is attending an SEC school.