I'd like to thank Amy Lakowski for writing the code and helping with the idea for this post.
So my friend Amy and I were studying for our IE 300, which is like STAT 400, and we got to talk about sororities. She isn’t in a sorority, so when we talk about Greek Life, we like to joke about some of the stereotypes of Greek Life, like the excessive drinking of frat boys, the pettiness of sorority girls, etc. Something that I think exemplifies all the laughable, if not downright embarrassing parts of Greek Life is GreekRank.com.
If you have never visited this website, don’t. The point of the website is to rank the sororities and fraternities, to divide them into tiers, looks, social and more. Rumors fly on the website, and though posts are (mostly) not written with malicious intent, most of them range from ridiculous to downright mean. The worst part of the website is seeing newly accepted students saying that they are interested in rush and wanted to get a taste of what the houses are like. The website is a laughingstock and one of the worst impressions of Greek Life that one can get. I was one of those girls and the cattiness on the website is not at all an accurate depiction of what being in a house at UIUC is like.
So I’m showing Amy this website because I know she’ll get a kick out of it, and also because we are sick of studying Stats for the sixth hour in a row. We were in the midst of laughing about all the ridiculous comments, how catty girls can be and cruel boys can be, when we see a post of the ranking of house GPAs, which has actual numbers and data to back up. This we found intriguing.
Some of my favorite comments are as follows:
Which, haha, there cannot be an average if there is no one above or below it. If we learned anything from studying stats, we know that much.
So naturally, as we are studying statistics, we decided to see if the discrepancies in the GPAs were statistically significant. Our calculation went as such: we multiplied the house average GPA times the number of active members (because that’s how many people reported their GPA), then divided by the total number of people so we found the weighted average of all girls that are a part of Pan-Hellenic council.
Once we wrote our python code to analyze the data, we decided to write our own post to show how ridiculous the other post was.
So as the post says, the distribution was so condensed around the average so the distribution was about as far from normal as it could get. This means that the difference in the GPAs was almost not important, that no one was statistically significantly high or low, and that, most importantly, we are all above the University GPA average (~3.1), the University Female Average (~3.2), and GPA doesn’t define a house, or us as people.
So Amy and I successfully used our Stats skills for a real life situation and to educate people that we are statistically not different, and therefore shouldn’t get big heads about or feel embarrassed about GPA.
