The Kansas State University Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL) community like to talk about how supportive we are to each other and we try really hard to walk the walk on that one, but one way that I see us failing to do that is in reporting of chapter GPA. It is reported in the booklets each Potential New Member (PNM) gets during Primary Recruitment and is listed as rankings on the KSU FSL website, which could be seen by PNMs as a ranking of the chapters as a whole. I know I saw it that way when I was crying because all the "top houses" let me go the first and second days. What I would come to realize is that which house you are in doesn't define what GPA you will get in college. If you study hard, work hard, and ask for help when needed you'll get the GPA you want. There are really smart and hardworking women in every single sorority and they are all willing to help you out when you need it.
I'll tell you why GPAs do matter: because school comes before sorority life. Always. But I'll tell you why the GPA of an entire house shouldn't matter:
1. Not a friendly competition
How can we consider ourselves friendly competitors if GPA is our top ranker? If it were a friendly competition it would be something that as a community we shared and had at our disposal to look at and reflect upon but would not be a means by which PNMs decide what chapter is the "best" or "worse."
2. Makes individual GPA reflect the whole chapter
Our GPA is individual as in it is not something we do as a chapter. When a chapter holds a philanthropy event, they are raising money as a chapter and therefore, it makes sense that this would be something that is connected to our sorority or fraternity as a whole. However, GPAs are entirely individual, so it's not right that they reflect an entire chapter especially to young women, PNMs, who are so impressionable. It can also feel as though a chapter's rank reflects your own "rank." When the GPA report is released the chapter GPA ranking can feel as though it reflects you as an individual, and that makes it hard to feel as though you are supported by the FSL community. When it feels as though your chapter's "rank" suddenly exemplifies your "rank" it is hard to love your chapter, and it is hard to love yourself, two things that are the main purposed of being members of this community in the first place.
3. Vicious cycle
When the GPA rankings are seen by the FSL community and PNMs as being chapter rankings, as they often are, it creates a vicious cycle. We are always trying to recruit the women who fit in best in our sorority and who we think would make our sorority a better place. However, when we are ranked based on GPA, many PNMs don't give the "bottom" houses much consideration because they think that we are bad chapters. They don't realize that every chapter is made up of amazing women and that they should be looking for a chapter that they can see themselves really supported in, not a chapter with the best GPA. As a young woman going through recruitment I researched only a little bit, just enough to know the GPAs of the sororities and nothing more. If I hadn't known the GPAs since the chapter GPA means little anyway I would have been more open during recruitment to those chapters I saw as "bottom tier" chapters.
4. In the ranking there is very little difference between your chapter and the chapter one spot ahead of you
For example, between the number 8 and 9 houses, there is a mere .004 difference. This .004 difference represents practically no real difference, so then why does one house seem better than the other if you look only at the rankings, which many do. There are chapter GPAs that vary more than that particular one, as that is the one with the smallest difference, but no one chapter has an incredible decrease in GPA than the chapter in the spot above it. The biggest difference between one chapter and the one directly below it is a .098. So why does such a small amount mean the difference between one spot and the next, and when used to put one chapter above another, what do rankings really mean if the difference between one house and the next is so small and inconsequential.
5. Doesn't reflect how much effort they put in
The women in the Fraternity and Sorority Life community are hard workers. They wouldn't have joined an organization that guarantees you extra work during the busiest years of your life if they weren't. So GPAs don't always reflect how hard they've been working, or how amazing they did for the class they are in. Some classes are easier for some than others, like any math or science class is extremely difficult for me but not for my roommate, and some are easier, I happen to find my French classes easier to get good grades in than some of the people in my class. So when we already have to worry about our GPAs affecting where we get a job after college is it really fair to make us stress even more by making it reflect who we are in college to the rest of our community?
It is fine to list the All IFC/PHC average on brochures for the prospective new students who come to tour Kansas State University. Our IFC/PHC average is higher than the all-university average and that is something to be proud of, but, it is not okay to rank and post our GPAs on recruitment brochures and the FSL website because these GPAs don't reflect the support and inspiration that each chapter will give to its members. GPA is so arbitrary and yet, it already defines part of my life, why does the FSL community continue to make it define my whole life?
