utm fraternities’ gpas rise as sororities’ decline

The paradigm of sororities as orderly and studious bastions of scholarship contrasted with less-than-academically-inclined fraternities is rarely so simple. The conditions at the University of Tennessee at Martin provide an illustration. Seven of eleven fraternities on campus saw their GPAs rise year over year, and none of the retrograde four lost more than seven hundredths of a point from their average GPA. The bellwether is Omega Psi Phi with almost a thirty percent gain, though some other fraternities did nearly as well. To be fair, Omega Psi Phi's rise still left its GPA below both the all-fraternity and all-independent averages; the absolute champion academically was Sigma Chi, with a 3.10 mean.

By contrast, only two of eight sororities (Delta Sigma Theta and Zeta Phi Beta) saw their GPAs rise, and neither by more than ten percent. But the sororities were already outpacing fraternities in absolute terms, with an all-sorority average of 3.02 trumping the all-fraternity average of 2.72—and also every individual fraternity except Sigma Chi. So the recent shifts only indicate the fraternity system catching up with sororities rather than surging ahead. Happily, both the all-fraternity and all-sorority averages were neatly over those of independents.

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