Is pi gamma mu a genuine and respected honor society?

Answer 1

No. Pi Gamma Mu is a small group of about 120 third-rate colleges and universities. Pi Gamma Mu has no top university or college chapters, has very low admission criteria, particularly in a period of grade inflation (e.g., B average, belonging to the first 35% of the graduating class, etc.), and it defines practically every non-science field as a social science to get as many members as possible. Pi Gamma Mu also begs so many college/university faculty to put up chapters in their respective schools because very few are aware of, or interested in, this group. See, for example, this link I found, which is contained below, is a more recent Pi Gamma Mu press release begging for chapters: Pi Gamma Mu also claims to be "international" simply because it has two chapters in two Third World countries (Kuwait and the Philippines).

Finally, Pi Gamma Mu has become redundant because there are already discipline-specific honor societies for any outstanding students in each of the Social Sciences.(e.g., Pi Sigma Alpha honor society in political science, Alpha Kappa Delta in sociology, Psi Chi in psychology, Alpha Phi Sigma in criminology, Lambda Alpha in anthropology, Omicron Delta Epsilon in economics, Sigma Iota Rho in international relations, Phi Alpha Theta in history, etc.). In fact, it is more difficult to gather different social science majors under one, so-called general social science honor society, like Pi Gamma Mu, which is why we have this proliferation of discipline-specific honor societies in the social sciences as noted above.

Answer 2

Pi Gamma Mu is the little brother of Phi Beta Kappa. Just check out Pi Gamma Mu's website and you will see the quality of people and school chapters that they have. One thing that will tell you what kind of organization it is may be found in their website's list of chapters. Their biggest chapters are either online schools or never-heard colleges and diploma mills. Over one-fifth (over 20%) of their new members each year come from an online, for-profit "school" known as APUS (American Public University System) that elects over 800 of its online students to Pi Gamma Mu.

Answer 3

No. Definitely illegitimate. As one reviewer already noted, it is a quacky group, pretending to be an "honor society" but does nothing except collect membership fees/dues from those that buy into it and solicits donations from its own officers. There is not a single top school with a chapter of this Pi Gamma Mu. And their chapters are in third-rate colleges and universities.