College grad exposes sorority’s ranking system: ‘The ultimate way to pit women against one another’

‘Why does Greek life exist?’

(TikTok / Eli Rallo)

A college graduate exposed how active members of her former sorority ranked potential new members in a viral video.

The video, which was posted to TikTok by popular content creator Eli Rallo, showed the points system her sorority sisters assigned to Greek life hopefuls during their recruitment process. Rallo, 23, was a member of the sorority Sigma Kappa while attending the University of Michigan. The video, which was shared last February, now has over one million views.

Sororities and fraternities are social organisations at US colleges which are identified by letters of the Greek alphabet.

“If you pretend not to know about the toxicity of Greek life, specifically sorority rush, I found this email from when I was in Greek life,” she began the video, which showed a screenshot of a numeric ranking process that was shared with the entirety of the sorority. “Rush” is the term for the sorority recruitment process, when students become acquainted with the sororities on campus during a series of social events.

“You have a five minute conversation with her then you have to rank her one out of four — one, she’s never coming back, four, she’s great — based on a five minute conversation,” Rallo explained. “Makes sense, right? That’s totally fair.”

The old email provided a breakdown of the ranking system, which explains that ones should be given to girls they “don’t ever want to see again” and excludes sophomores who are “weird”, “average”, or “just nice”. One ranking included a description that read, “Not sure how she still got through get her out now”. Another said, “She isn’t the absolute worst but she shouldn’t be here, get her out”.

Rallo, who goes by @thejarr on TikTok, said that active members of her sorority would then meet in groups to decide on the rankings for each rushee. However, she believed the ranking system was so ‘heinous’ that she tried to sabotage the recruitment process every year.

“I thought that this was so heinous and ludicrous that every single time my group was like, ‘Let’s give her threes,’ I would give her all ones,” she clarified. “And then if my group was like, ‘Let’s give her ones,’ I would give her threes to mess the system.”

There are an estimated 750,000 fraternity and sorority members in college and more than nine million alumni in the United States. Greek life on college campuses throughout the US have come under fire recently for contributing to campus rape and sexual assault, hazing deaths, and perpetuating racist, homophobic, and sexist behaviour.

“This is a nightmare,” Rallo said of Sigma Kappa’s ranking system. “It’s disgusting. It is the ultimate way to pit women against one another— judge them for the most arbitrary things.”

“This is misogynistic, it’s fatphobic, it’s classist, it’s so many horrible things,” she added. “Why does Greek life exist?”