What GPA is too low for your campus?

[annabella]

I love that my alma mater's Panhellenic recruitment form asked for ACT/SAT scores. GPA alone should never be an indicator of someone's potential. A grade cut is a grade cut is a grade cut, but for someone "on the bubble," or from an unfamiliar school, it can help a lot.

Or hurt, depending upon how you want to look at it. A girl graduated from my high school with a 3.5, but only scored a 20 on her ACT (the GPA was a result of heli-momming at its finest). The combination definitely hurt her in recruitment.

[joliebelle]

Recruitment at my school isn't competitive, and recs are pretty much unheard of. I believe that the minimum to register for recruitment is a 2.0. My chapter's minimum for new members is a 2.5, and we really look for girls with at least a 3.0 or very close to it. Going off of the pnms last year, there were only one or two girls that had a gpa lower than a 2.5

[VandalSquirrel]

Originally Posted by HuskyAlum

I encourage EVERY chapter I work with to cut any girl coming out of high school with below a 3.0 GPA (and if it's deferred recruitment or she's an upperclassman, a 2.75 GPA).

I realize that at some schools this is really not possible; here are 2 examples...

- At an SEC school I worked with last year, at the end of the first round they had to cut right around 600 PNMs. They ended up going all the way to a 3.2 with their cuts. Now of course if someone LOVED Suzie and she had a 3.1, we would make an exception. This also happened for legacies and other situations.

- At a school in the midwest my chapter's cumulative GPA was a 2.9... I was not pleased at all... until I discovered that the All Women's cumulative GPA was a 2.3. Yikes. Still, I encouraged those girls to seriously look at anyone with below a 3.0.

I mean, seriously... anyone who CAN'T get a 3.0 out of high school might have some serious trouble getting through college. Now that's not our call to make really, but is it fair to pledge/initiate someone who is going to be on Academic Probation right away and then have to be terminated because of grades?

One thing to keep in mind is that my encouragement of the 3.0 is WELL above the national requirement for someone to be pledged or initiated. So to answer the added question, no I do NOT think that a 3.0 is really good enough to get you into an SEC sorority. IMHO

In my dream world we obtain new members after one semester so we know they can make it through college, but that's not how it works most places.

I guess I'm a bit more lenient as I meet A LOT of students who are the first in their family to go to college and they did not have all the benefits others did to get a 4.0 in high school. Economic benefits, parental support, neighborhood, school of choice, and many other factors play in that can cause a student to not be at a level we decide. I hate the arbitrary numbers of it all, and dislike that things beyond a college freshman's control can keep them from getting a fair shot. We all know of members who flunk out, show us they have personal issues that do not mesh well with group membership, are miserable people, so GPA is not the be all end all.