Yesterday, the NCAA released its second annual Academic Progress Rate report.
Instituted last February, the APR is designed to measure the performance of athletic programs in moving student-athletes toward graduation.
Unfortunately, the APR is a severely flawed way of holding athletic departments accountable for the academic success of their athletes. The criteria used to measure a program's performance create many incentives to cheat the system.
Each athlete can earn up to two points per semester -- one for being academically eligible and one for not transferring to another institution.
Every team at every NCAA school receives an APR score that is calculated by dividing the team's total number of points by the maximum points. A perfect score is a 1.000, which the NCAA translates to 1,000.
Teams with a score less than 925 are penalized by losing scholarships.
Not surprisingly, at 994 the Ivy League has the highest average conference APR in Division I. In 15 of the 20 most popular sports in the nation, the Ivy League had the highest ranking.
Yale had the highest average APR score in the league (999.0) and Cornell had the lowest (988.0). Penn was sixth with an average APR score of 991.7.
One can assume that practically every Ivy League athlete is academically eligible and working toward graduation. Thus, a less-than-perfect score in the Ivy League is most likely for benign reasons, like transferring to another university.
Equally unsurprising is that the Patriot League is second in the nation with an average APR of 984.3. Like the Ivy League, this conference has a reputation for academic excellence.
But the ratings of some of the other top 10 conferences in the nation -- the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 10 and the Big East-- are surprising.
In fact, of the 99 programs that had APR scores worse than 925, only seven were from the six major conferences: the ACC, the Big East, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Southeastern and the Pacific 10. And only one of those seven, DePaul's men's basketball squad, was a football or basketball team.
Does this mean that the six power conferences are academically superior to most other conferences?
Unfortunately, the APR doesn't tell us that. And therein lies the problem.
All the APR shows is that athletes haven't flunked out of school. We have no clue as to how well athletes performed compared to their non-athlete peers.
Thus, if programs don't want to lose scholarships, they are encouraged by this formula to do everything possible to keep athletes academically eligible.
Schools can allow athletes to major in silly subjects like Underwater Basket-Weaving. They give them excessive "tutoring." There's even pressure to inflate grades just to keep them on the team.
If a school chooses to hold its athletes to the same standards as the rest of its students, however, it will likely have to face a loss of scholarships.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no good way to fix the APR.
Adding a component to the formula for GPA would only further encourage athletes to take easy majors,and some sort of standardized test would be far too cumbersome.
So for the time being, the APR should simply be eliminated. It's nice to see the Ivy League ranked atop the NCAA for a change, but the current benchmark for measuring academic progress only seems to punish those schools most unwilling to bend the rules. David Burrick is a senior urban studies major from Short Hills, N.J., and former Senior Sports Editor and Executive Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is dburrick@sas.upenn.edu
