At the University of Southern California, students have employed artificial intelligence to compile a “definitive” ranking of fraternities and sororities, igniting further discussions about Greek life on campus.
Tomoki Chien, a journalism student who manages the Morning Trojan newsletter, shared that her motivation stemmed from a sense of frustration with existing frat and sorority rankings on SideChat, an anonymous social media site popular among students.
“To tackle this issue, I gathered over 140,000 posts from USC’s SideChat servers, processed them through a large language model to create rankings, and then applied code and AI-powered data analysis to derive an overall score,” Chien explained.
Chien’s findings revealed TKE, Pike, and Sig Chi as the top three fraternities, while DG, Kappa, and Theta claimed the top spots among sororities.
Chien noted, “The overall rankings align quite well with the conventional perception of House hierarchy, generally tied to wealth and glamour for sororities, and party-throwing capabilities for fraternities.”
Out of the extensive pool of SideChat posts, Chien narrowed the focus using ChatGPT to include only those explicitly ranking Greek life based on familiar criteria.
For instance, posts referencing “wokeness” were excluded, but criteria like “Most Attractive Pledge Classes” and “Best Parties” were incorporated.
“Interestingly, among the 790 posts that ranked Greek life, about three-quarters focused solely on frats,” he mentioned.
Looking back at fall 2023, the rankings for the leading colleges have remained “relatively stable,” though there has been some variance from semester to semester among the top groups.
Chien remarked that while the ZBT fraternity’s standing has been on the rise, other organizations, like the AXO sorority, have seen a notable decline in their rankings.
