Came across this document when I was trying to help a young poster get information about sorority GPA requirements and thought I’d pass along a few general stats:
https://ofsl.sa.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/Fall-2015-Greek-Grade-Report1.pdf
And while there’s no way I’m aware of to identify GPA by college or major within the university, note that the coed engineering fraternity, Theta Tau, lists its total member GPA as 3.09. I have no idea if this is indicative of the average GPA across the College of Engineering, but I’m guessing it’s not higher than that number.
Statistical manna!?
So, my initial observation is that non-Greeks have lower GPAs? Interesting.
Yes, Greeks on average have higher GPAs, but it’s not clear if certain majors help skew the numbers one way or the other. For example, are engineers less likely to be in Greek Life organizations? Do engineers have lower GPAs on average than other majors?
I’ve seen lots of conjecture over the years but no hard data.
Well, it appears that the men are virtually identical - non-greek vs greek. Most of the sororities (from what I have seen/heard) place a very high emphasis on GPA and sometimes suspend/remove members for a GPA below what the chapter considers acceptable. (Many/some of the fraternities also place a strong emphasis on GPA.)
I can’t find any UA data on GPA by major, but you could use UF’s as a proxy.
http://www.ir.ufl.edu/factbook/degree.htm
The first table, Table II-1, breaks it down by year and college (Engineering, Business Administration, etc.). The overall University’s average GPA is 3.34 (fall 2014). Engineering was 3.28, Business Administration was 3.15, while Education was 3.76. Why would engineering be higher than BA? Well, BA includes accounting and finance majors, very rigorous majors, and engineers tend to be stronger students.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the UA college of engineering average GPA is higher than the University’s average, based on the strength of it’s top quartile of students (vs the weakness of it’s bottom quartile), who tend towards STEM majors.
Thanks for those UF stats, @Gator88NE. I’d bet that’s pretty reflective of flagships in general.
I guess the part that’s not clear to me is how Bama’s acceptance of very high-stat students into engineering skews it in one direction, with its acceptance of the lowest stats students countering it. There are no separate admissions requirements for engineering (an institutional decision intended to encourage all students to pursue their majors of choice and to challenge themselves). Obviously a lot of those lower quartile students are going to drop out of engineering so their GPAs will be removed from the equation, and the top students more often than not (I think!) remain.
It’s not like UF and other more selective schools where the pool is more academically accomplished to begin with and where you often have to qualify as an underclassman for the engineering college.
As we used to call it - freshman College of Engineering, AKA pre-business.