how important are grades

I personally went through the process last year of looking at all of the girls going through recruitment and their backgrounds. The better GPA you have, the more likely you are to keep successfully going through rounds at the houses without other girls with higher GPAs booting you out. But you can easily get lost in translation if your GPA isn't exceptional. Scholarship is a pretty significant part of greek life and because of that a lot of houses have minimum GPAs and there are people who are not even considered due to their GPAs. Honestly I rarely saw any incoming freshman who were rejected because of their high school grades, it was all college women who were rushing for their sophomore year and had poor GPAs.

like the person above, i also was someone who looked at all the girls going through recruitment. if you are above a 2.8, you won't get rejected right away. having above a 3.0 is ideal, but you won't be able to compete as well as girls with 3.9s. we see your GPA bc you're required to give it to us when signing up for recruitment. like the girl above said, you're fine since you're coming out of HS; this is mostly an issue for sophomores who did bad freshman year

if you don't have straight A's and at least in the top ten percent of your class, don't even bother rushing

Wow you have friends in axo at several schools. Interesting.