The NCAA Released their “Academic Progress Report” today and then gushed about all their “progress.” The name alone tells you right away that the entire thing was manufactured to keep the heat off the NCAA and make it look like “progress” is being made. Note they didn’t release “A Report Entirely Devoid of Spin on Exactly How Each Institution of Higher Learning is Actually Doing Right This Very Moment With Regard To Actually Educating Their Student Athletes” This is much like those weekly progress reports you fill out every week in your thankless job to let your 7 bosses know that the “top priority” project you’ve been working on is now “83% done” versus the “79% done” of last week even though it’s really been stuck at 15% done since September. Of 2002. But hey, you put it in a spreadsheet and used TLAs, so it’s all good. Thank God for scope creep.
Ooh! Look! A graph!
What does it mean?
Absolutely nothing!
But to the NCAA, an organization that does absolutely nothing useful to any segment of humanity, it means…
The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program (APP) is creating positive behavioral change among Division I institutions, according to new four-year data released May 6.
The multi-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) data – with four years of data collection available for the first time – show upward trends in several categories, especially from 2005-06 to 2006-07. The overall APR, which measures student-athlete performance based on eligibility and retention, rose slightly, with increases in both eligibility and retention and a decrease in the number of student-athletes leaving school while academically ineligible.
Um. Okay. So how is the APR calculated?
Each Division I sports team receives an APR. An APR of 925 roughly projects to
a 60 percent graduation success rate. To calculate the APR, every student-athlete
is tracked by eligibility and retention, the two most reliable factors in predicting
graduation. Those who do well in the classroom and stay in school earn two
points. Those who pass but do not return to school earn one point. If a studentathlete
fails academically and leaves school, their team loses two points. If a
student-athlete returns to school later and graduates, the school earns one bonus
point. The team’s APR is calculated by dividing the total points earned in a year by
the total points possible.
So the “perfect score” is 1000, and yet, in an Academic Progress Report, a 60% graduation rate translates, roughly to a 925? 925 over 1000 is 92.5. Why use a 1000 point benchmark? Is there really a need for the granularity of 1000 units of whatever the heck the APR is measuring? What the heck is this thing measuring?
By the way, that 925 is the “benchmark” score. Any program falling under that score is subject to “contemporaneous penalties.”
For fun, I took the APR numbers of teams on this year’s ND Football schedule and compared them to the latest published GSR (graduation success rates) of each school respectively. Now, maybe the most recently published GSR numbers aren’t the GSR numbers the NCAA used to calculate APR, but if they aren’t, then why not?
As you can see, Michigan State fell dangerously close to falling below the benchmark. SDSU was the only team not to get a score in the lofty 900s on ND’s schedule (again, why are we playing SDSU?). Purdue scored a 920, but aren’t listed under the NCAA’s list of programs that will be receiving penalties. I’m sure there’s an explanation. It’s probably got to do with “momentum” or something, which will probably play a role in the fact that MSU got a “passing” grade even though they’re sporting a GSR of 43. Maybe it’s because, if these programs fall below the benchmark, they can, essentially, promise to do better next year, and get a reprieve. I used to promise I’d do better next year all the time, but did that ever stop me from getting fired? Never mind. Didn’t the NCAA just say a GSR of 60 roughly translated to a 925? So confusing. But like I said, maybe the GSR numbers are old, and MSU made an improvement of 17 points in the GSR this past year. Maybe.
Ultimately, the APR is a freaking joke. There’s more smoothing out of blemishes here than at your average junior high. So tomorrow, when you hear on the radio about how things are getting better, and programs you’d expect to get penalized aren’t, just remember that MSU is sporting a freaking 43 GSR and not getting penalized either.
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