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NCAA Academic Reforms (Merged)

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NCCA Will Actually use an "APR" - this is ~= 50% Grad Rate

The actual numbers NCAA will use to judge a colleges student-athlete graduation rate are the "APR"
The following sniped from http://www2.ncaa.org/media_and_events/press_room/2005/january/20050110_d1_bod.html

The plan adopted by the Board of Directors at the annual NCAA Convention establishes a cut score of 925 for the Academic Performance Rate. The APR is based on individual academic performance and retention of student-athletes. A cut score of 925 is roughly equivalent to an expected 50 percent graduation rate, using the current federal methodology for calculating graduation rates.
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I.e. The SI article (and others no doubt) will cite a 50% Graduation Rate.
That does not mean that the actual grad rate is in use. Rather it is this Academic Performance Rate.

Noteworthy -- the APR is measured using the Federal methodology. If that is so then that's interesting. I was under the impression that federal methodology referred to Department of Education, thus the 50% benchmark means you follow a class from day one through end of life. If you had 100 students in class on day one but only 50% at end of class life then this is exactly a 50% graduation rate. Given that NCAA is using this new APR metric, it seems something else is going on. I'll have to do a little digging.

Then there is this from same article:
The NCAA academic reform program is based on both real time and long-term measurements of student academic performance.

The APR will be calculated each year based on the number of student-athletes on each team who remain academically eligible, continue as full-time students and graduate. The cut score will be adjusted to ensure that teams falling below the 50 percent standard would be at risk for contemporaneous penalties.
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Again, more digging needed - -- However, this sounds very much like transferees don't count against you when going out to another program. Unclear from this is how do Juniors leaving early for the NFL get counted.

Finally there is this:

In the long term, a Graduation Success Rate (GSR) will be established based on the number of scholarship student-athletes who graduate each year, including transfer student-athletes. The federal government currently does not count transfer students in the official graduation rates of colleges and universities. Student-athletes who leave the institution and would have been eligible to return will not be counted against the GSR.
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Still unclear how NFL bound juniors would be counted as the whole issue here is academic completion, not athletic eligibility?

There are a couple of other attachments from the NCAA agenda for this meeting:

http://www1.ncaa.org/membership/governance/division_I/management_council/2005/Janaury/08_Att_B.htm

In which is found this description of the APR scoring system:

Recommended APR Scoring System. The committee reviewed various alternative APR scoring scales and considered a scoring scale that employs projected graduation rates. Under this model, a team's APR score would be multiplied by 1000 and that number would be correlated to a projected graduation rate (e.g., Institution X has an APR score of 885 (.885 raw APR score x 1000) that projects to a predicted graduation rate of 36%). The
committee noted that correlating the cut score to graduation rates would be easier for the membership and public to understand.
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How .885 is measured, and how the correlation is drawn remains -- for the moment -- as clear as mud to me. The following is the NCAA's own cheat sheet for AARR, which was a forbearer of the present APR metric.

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Colleges are monitored for accreditation today but I am not sure how comprehensive or effective that is in addressing small groups of strudents who get favorable treatment.
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Colleges have been monitored for accreditation purposes for some time now. The accrediting body, NCA, usually has a site visit every 10 years (accreditations are good for 10 year blocks, although some schools only get them in 5 year blocks if they have issues). Each department/program has to submit a report to be included in the institutions overall report. (I cannot fathom how voluminous said report for a large institution like OSU would be.)
The NCA is trying to move to a process that is more regular than every 10 years and not as paper intensive.

I have seen where as a result of a NCA visit, improvements made to athletic departments that caused a better plan to monitor student-athletes progress in courses. IMO good institutions go one step beyond simple monitoring and implement an intervention plan if the progress report on a student-athlete is not so hot. (I could go on and on about this since I have been involved with 3 different athletic departments at the 3 different institutions I have taught at pertaining to monitoring and intervention, at least in my discipline.)

Found the following on the APR computed by NCAA. Even though the reporter states the formula is complex, it is fairly straight forward.

The academic reform formula is complex. It will introduce to the college sports lexicon Academic Progress Rate, or APR, which may become as familiar as BCS or RPI.

After each semester, a team will be given one point for each athlete who remains academically eligible and another point for each athlete who returns the next semester or graduates. For a men's basketball team with 13 scholarships, that's a maximum of 26 points a semester, and 52 points a year.

Let's say one player becomes academically ineligible. That means the team has 12 players who met both criteria, which makes each player two for two. The one who became ineligible is zero for two. That leaves the team with 24 of a possible 26 points for the semester.

The APR is measured by the year. If all 12 players maintain their academic progress the next semester, that's 48 of 50 points, or .960. Multiply that by 1,000 to get an APR of 960.

The NCAA cutoff APR is 925. If the APR falls below 925, the team will lose a scholarship for each athlete who became academically ineligible and left school with eligibility remaining.
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link
 
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BrutusBobcat said:
I wonder if they are going to have a Mormon exception. The reason that BYU is at the bottom of that list is almost certainly because nearly all of their students (and players) go on a multi-year evangelical mission during their college years.
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Randomly... the "proper" term for this is "whiteshirting." :)
 
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Thanks buckiprof & xevious.
Seems APR is now clarified in re calculation with all players still on campus.
How / If there are special dispensations for transfers / junior to NFL etc. remains unclear to me.
 
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I believe the NCAA will count dropouts, transfers and juniors who leave early against the institution. This will force schools to really look at who they allow to enter their school to play sports. When schools start to lose 4 and 5 scholarships a year, the landscape in college sports will change. What will Cincinnati's basketball team look like. What will this do to some SEC and Big 12 teams. Does not matter if you are putting guys in the NFL. If you don't graduate players you will start down a death spiral. I believe its only going to get real interesting when these provisions are implemented.
 
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NCAA rule to come down hard on Colleges

Just read this in this mornings Dispatch. Looks like the NCAA is going to start being hard on graduation requirements. I don't have a big problem with them doing this. My problem is that they count players leaving early against the universities. I can see where it may be the Universities fault for recruiting and giving a scholarship to someone that can't cut the academic mustered. But I dissagree with the NCAA counting players leaving early for professional sports against graduation percentages when the penalty for not meeting these standards is removal of scholarships, suspension from postseason play (bowls, NCAA tournament, etc) and ultimately removal from the NCAA itself.

Read and see what you think.

NCAA rule would flunk teams at most schools
Jill Riepenhoff
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
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When the NCAA sends warning letters next month to athletic teams with poor classroom performance, nearly every big-league university could be on the mailing list, including Ohio State.

Based on the most-current records, 94 percent of Division I-A universities failed to graduate more than half of the freshmen who received a scholarship in 1997-98 for football, men’s basketball or baseball.

Even schools known for high academic standards — Duke, Michigan, Northwestern, Notre Dame and Wake Forest — have at least one team struggling to meet graduation requirements, the 2004 data shows.

Next month, the NCAA will begin its most stringent push for academic excellence with a program designed to punish teams with bad grades — generally those whose graduation rates are lower than 50 percent.

Penalties begin with a warning and a public admonishment, then escalate to loss of scholarships if athletes drop out of school. Next year, the NCAA is expected to increase sanctions to include bans on postseason tournaments and bowls and even revocation of NCAA membership for habitual offenders.

"The NCAA and the institutions are remembering what we’re all about is graduation," said John Bruno, an Ohio State psychology professor who serves as the university’s faculty representative to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. "It gives an institution a very valued marker of the coaches’ commitment to the academic side. It gives you real data, not just rhetoric."

An academic performance rating will be determined for each team based on points awarded for academic eligibility and retention of its scholarship athletes.

Most athletes at Division I-A schools receive scholarships. The NCAA allows schools to give 85 scholarships in football, 13 in men’s basketball and 11.7 in baseball. At Ohio State, there are 114 players on the football team, 13 on the basketball team and 36 on the baseball team.

Bruno expects the NCAA to expand the rating in years to come to include athletes who don’t receive financial assistance.

Teams that score less than 925, which represents a 50 percent graduation rate, might face sanctions.

The 2004 graduation rates provide a glimpse of academic performance in the three sports that the NCAA identifies as problem areas:

• Only six schools graduated more than half of their football, men’s basketball and baseball scholarship players: Boston College, Rice, Stanford, Texas Christian, Vanderbilt and Virginia.

• Thirteen schools, including Big Ten member Minnesota and football powers Oklahoma and Texas, posted graduation rates of less than 50 percent in all three sports.

• In football, Michigan State and Minnesota were among the 37 teams that failed to graduate half of their scholarship players. Northwestern posted the highest football graduation rate in the Big Ten at 83 percent, followed by Michigan and Penn State at 68 percent.

• In men’s basketball, not a single scholarship athlete from the 1997-98 freshman class graduated at 42 schools, including Ohio State. With a median graduation rate of 33 percent, basketball players are about half as likely to finish school as the rest of the student body.

• In baseball, nearly half of the teams posted graduation rates of less than 50 percent. Ohio State’s team teeters on the brink of academic underachievement, with just half of its scholarship athletes graduating.

The lure of professional sports especially hurts basketball and baseball teams, said Kevin Lennon, NCAA vice president of membership services. Athletes drop out — often in poor academic standing — to chase athletic careers.

"Any time you have young people who are dropping out and not completing the work, that’s a problem," Lennon said. "The incentive is to keep them on scholarship and invest in their academic success."

Myles Brand, NCAA chief executive officer, has said the new requirements will change the culture of college sports. "Success as a student as well as an athlete, simply, is the only acceptable standard for the future in college sports."

Ohio State Associate Athletics Director Kate Riffee said the university won’t be surprised if the basketball team receives an NCAA warning next month.

"They need to know where they are academically," she said. "This whole reform package sets clear expectations."

Yet she expects a quick recovery. Riffee’s staff at the Student-Athlete Support Services Office has been working to bolster academic success among all athletes by assigning an adviser to each and creating plans to help students keep progressing toward a degree.

The football team’s graduation rate has risen nearly 40 points since coach Jim Tressel arrived in 2000.

Riffee and Bruno, the faculty adviser, say the basketball team will follow suit under first-year coach Thad Matta.

"This is a coaching staff that gets it and is committed to academics," Bruno said. "We’ll be OK. Everything is in place for Ohio State to succeed."
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In re: Players leaving early for NFL getting counted against graduation rates.
If a Student (not scholar athlete) leaves early to start his own business {think Gates, Harvard, Microsoft} then that counts against the graduation rate for that class.
Why should it be any different in pure number terms for a scholar athlete taking that offer to go to major leagues in Baseball, Basketball or Football?
Where the NCAA may wish to cut some slack is if there is a program effort to assist players in completion of their degrees once in the workforce.
In re impact on tOSU football:
As long as JT et al do their job the graduation picture for Buckeye players will likely further improve.

Some links to background data:
http://www.collegefootballnews.com/2004/Preview/ProgramRankings_GraduationRates.htm

The latest data from the NCAA:
http://www.ncaa.org/grad_rates/2004/d1/index.html

On how the NCAA is going further than DOE demands / allows:
http://www.ncaa.org/releases/miscellaneous/2004/2004032201ms.htm

Lastly to NDChief:

Yes the graduation rates for the Fighting Irish remain stellar:
http://www.ncaa.org/grad_rates/2004/d1/schools/RPT00513.html

If Weiss and crew get the talent pool in South Bend back up to snuff might that diminish those scores when more ND players elect an early departure?

Nonetheless - the rates at tOSU are improved and improving. Can schools such as the University of Texas or Oklahoma say the same thing?
 
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