NCAA in turmoil: Why UNC can't get past its fake classes scandal

[pap49cba]

From Bloomberg.... LINK

 

[HuskyFan1125]

If the NCAA starts digging they will surely find that this practice exists at other universities.

Ripple effect will be huge.

 

[triaddukefan]

Good to see that my tax money has gone to good use down there

 

[Sargassoc]

The British paper The Guardian printed this essay (scroll down to see the essay in question), supposedly written by one of the athletes in question: LINK

If it's real, it's shocking proof of the level of dishonesty that was acceptable at the university. I teach English to high school seniors of all ability levels and all of my students would laugh at that.

 

[UcMiami]

Just watched the real sports segment as well which is very damning. I had forgotten that with the 'graduation rate' criteria that the NCAA adopted that they had thrown out any requirement for test scores for enrolling scholarship students - there used to be a minimum SAT/ACT score required. There remains however a HS or Equivalency requirement I believe and based on at least one of the athletes interviewed there is no way he could have completed even the most simplified HS Equivalency exam. So the problem starts at an even earlier level than college.
That said ... you do begin to wonder about Uconn and all other universities and how they are scheming the system. I certainly get the sense that WCBB and women's sports in general and the men's non-revenue sports are academically more rigorous, but I would not be surprised to discover that a majority of football and MBB players at Uconn were clustered into some form of 'general education' degree. I have also been a little concerned about a few of the WCBB players that have independent majors or interdisciplinary majors. Those can be red flags for a course load that pulls together a bunch of non-academic courses with a few what we used to call 'gut' classes.
The total no-show classes that UNC created is taking things to a different level, but I suspect there are very few scholarship athletic programs for football or men's basketball that would actually stand up to close scrutiny. It is almost a situation where the NCAA has promoted academic fraud as part of a PR campaign and by making penalties so devastating for programs that do pass a shame standard that has been set.

 

[pap49cba]

So a bunch of varsity athletes 'took' non-existent classes and received good grades and the team GPA's were just fine. What am I missing here?

 

[DobbsRover2]

So a bunch of varsity athletes 'took' non-existent classes and received good grades and the team GPA's were just fine. What am I missing here?

Money, lots of it. The whole system may be rotten at the core, and likely every program is complicit in at least smaller ways with the football-no-shows system. Whether UNC though totally horrific is even the worst is hard to say, because whistle-blowers in the SEC probably don't even have the puff to give a toot.

This is all connected to the athletes' rights movement and the union, because when you leave all the power in the hands of make-money-at-all-costs athletic departments, than the absolute power will often corrupt as badly as it did with the Tarred Heels.

 

[Wbbfan1]

UNC got away with it because the Non Existent classes were also offered to Non Athletes as well. That's why the NCAA did not levy any sanctions when this first came up.

 

[pap49cba]

UNC got away with it because the Non Existent classes were also offered to Non Athletes as well. That's why the NCAA did not levy any sanctions when this first came up.

But that does not answer the varsity team GPA issue which is what the UConn men's team was drawn and quartered over.

 

[Sportsman5]

But that does not answer the varsity team GPA issue which is what the UConn men's team was drawn and quartered over.

Yes and no. GPA only hurts the Apr if a player fails a course and doesn't receive the credits and doesn't graduate as a result, transfers with a poor GPA, or leaves school not on track to graduate (this prevents early entry draft players from hurting the Apr). The system can easily be gamed by making students pass their courses and take enough during the summer to lighten the load during the year. A 2.0 GPA in most instances is as good as a 4.0 at getting 1000 on the Apr score

 

[msf22b]

Some thoughts:

UConn men's program was honest enough that athletes who didn't do well in class were given the poor grades they deserved; therefore UConn had to be punished by the NCAA.

North Carolina solved that problem by awarding high grades for virtually any or no work and by that gambit of including a few non-athletes escaped scrutiny by the NCAA.

With no NCAA standard for admission, Student?-Athletes completely unprepared for college work can be and are accepted.

The whole role of the NCAA in academic standards is scurrilous in the extreme.

And one last point: There seems to be a general whining about how the poor kids were short-changed, being granted a degree w/o really learning anything.

In the real world, having the degree is all that matters, you don't really have to know anything.

I didn't learn a thing in college, I'm sure many will have had the same experience. It's after (sometimes graduate school, sometimes the real world) that you develop the skills for your life's work. The degree is an admission ticket for certain endeavors; nothing more.

Its like a Metro-Card; gets you into the subway.

 

[diggerfoot]

UNC got away with it because the Non Existent classes were also offered to Non Athletes as well. That's why the NCAA did not levy any sanctions when this first came up.

Ah yes, well, except that the sign up period for these non-existent classes was constricted and differed from normal sign-ups in order to give a leg up to the athletes. Of course, that's a level of complexity too great for the NCAA to fathom.

 

[intlzncster]

That said ... you do begin to wonder about Uconn and all other universities and how they are scheming the system. I certainly get the sense that WCBB and women's sports in general and the men's non-revenue sports are academically more rigorous, but I would not be surprised to discover that a majority of football and MBB players at Uconn were clustered into some form of 'general education' degree. I have also been a little concerned about a few of the WCBB players that have independent majors or interdisciplinary majors. Those can be red flags for a course load that pulls together a bunch of non-academic courses with a few what we used to call 'gut' classes.

UCONN was guilty of being too honest comparatively. The APR is generally agreed to be a silly metric. Everyone games the system, but UCONN did not put enough effort into doing it. As far as I can tell, there is no 'madeup' major for athletes at UCONN.

There's also the problem with players like Gavin Edwards. He was two classes from graduating senior year. Instead of finishing up, he was encouraged by JC to take a shot at a non NBA professional basketball opportunity. He therefore counted as a zero on UCONN's APR. Which is dumb, seeing as he was pursuing a career, could graduate any time he chose to finish up, and received a good education while he was here.

Kentucky, one of the most egregious NCAA basketball factories, allows their potential NBA players to not even stay on campus after the season is over. They go to another city to train for the NBA. Ostensibly they take 'online classes', but you can guess what the level (or requirement of even participating) of those are. There's been credible reports of some of their players never attending a class at UK.

There was a stretch where Kentucky's APR was better than Harvard's! Who do you think was getting the better education?

One more comment on UCONN: What kind of rule is made up, then applied retroactively, giving the University no time to address/fix the problem, and then penalizes kids who weren't even involved in the first place? That whole thing smelled of something else.

 

[HoopsFan21]

One more comment on UCONN: What kind of rule is made up, then applied retroactively, giving the University no time to address/fix the problem, and then penalizes kids who weren't even involved in the first place? That whole thing smelled of something else.

UConn was getting too good, so the NCAA had to punish them. It's what the old college basketball "blue bloods" wanted. Fortunately there isn't anything they can do about the women's program. Maybe if that sexual harassment lawsuit against Geno a couple years back got any kind of traction the women's team would be given the death penalty.

 

[UcMiami]

And one last point: There seems to be a general whining about how the poor kids were short-changed, being granted a degree w/o really learning anything.

In the real world, having the degree is all that matters, you don't really have to know anything.

I didn't learn a thing in college, I'm sure many will have had the same experience. It's after (sometimes graduate school, sometimes the real world) that you develop the skills for your life's work. The degree is an admission ticket for certain endeavors; nothing more.

Its like a Metro-Card; gets you into the subway.

Just going to disagree with this somewhat. Both the school on the diploma and the major do have an effect in hiring decision for that 'first job'. When you have no work resume, the first questions in an interview are 'so what did you major in' and when the answer comes back 'General Studies' or 'Interdisciplinary Studies' or now with a UNC diploma 'African Studies' the red flag goes up. And this is especially true for high profile athletes who may get the interview because of name recognition, but ...
In terms of what you learn in college - some of it is related to what you invest personally, but it is generally not the facts and figures or the detailed knowledge of Chaucer or the battle of Waterloo. What a liberal arts education gives you is exposure to a range of historic thought and human endeavor, plus the ability to think critically and analyze and organize information - to take a volume of various information from multiple sources and synthesize it into a cogent response/conclusion. It is that commodity that employers are looking for and that the degree you have is at least an indication of your having achieved.
(Obviously certain majors carry more specific indicators and involved more specific skills acquisitions, e.g. mechanical engineering - but people who have those majors rarely make statements that 'they learned nothing.')

I do agree that the athletes and the people that 'whine' about their plight are ignoring a lot of the positives of the situation. The percentage of athletes, whatever it is who receive scholarships without the requisite skills to perform the academic work get a free ride to a pretty nice four year lifestyle and the chance to use the facilities and work with trainers and coaches to develop their physical skills in pursuit of a dream of a very lucrative professional career that they would not get without their 'scholarship'. That is quite a nice deal when the alternative with their HS 'diploma' and limited learning skills would likely be low skill, low wage employment or unemployment in the real world. That those who do not have the skills to take advantage of the educational opportunity and do not have the skills to get a professional contract, return to those same low skill/low wage jobs after their four years is not really that relevant. They got a great opportunity for free and I imagine 99% of them would look back at those 4 years as some of the best years of their lives.

And I also suspect that most of the folks that toil in the minor leagues in baseball or the semi-pro leagues in other sports would have gladly traded the crappy part time jobs and lousy facilities and long bus trips for a chance at 4 years of free living and training on a college campus had they had the chance. For that percentage of academically challenged athletes a scholarship really does represent the minor leagues and it is a much better deal than most minor leaguers ever get.

 

[msf22b]

Uc

I'm certainly guilty of exaggerating a little here and your central description of the value of a liberal arts education is spot on.

But I do still hold to my contention that a North Carolina scholarship, varsity player can take his (perhaps worthless) degree and get a decent ob.

Would make a fascinating PHD dissertation to quantify this.

 

[uconnfan68]

But that does not answer the varsity team GPA issue which is what the UConn men's team was drawn and quartered over.

Not a GPA issue, never was. See posts by 'upstater' on the men's board for coherent explanations regarding the APR. Basically, it is just a "here/not here" count. How Kentucky gets away with it is beyond me.

 

[UcMiami]

Uc

I'm certainly guilty of exaggerating a little here and your central description of the value of a liberal arts education is spot on.

But I do still hold to my contention that a North Carolina scholarship, varsity player can take his (perhaps worthless) degree and get a decent ob.

Would make a fascinating PHD dissertation to quantify this.

The real issue isn't the athletic scholarship player in general, but the ones that enter college reading at a third or fourth grade level and end up with maybe the equivalent of a tenth grade education. The ESPN piece gave a college graduate a test and he scored at middle school level. Those folks are not getting entry level jobs in any white collar job. Heck, when I was hiring in Montego Bay, JA, they wouldn't have gotten jobs competing against HS students for data entry operator jobs.
The real question is how did they get the HS diploma to even qualify for the joke of a college scholarship they were given, because that is still the one academic requirement. They had one guy that had spent his college years teaching himself to read using 'Sam I Am' and other children's picture books.

 

[intlzncster]

Not a GPA issue, never was. See posts by 'upstater' on the men's board for coherent explanations regarding the APR. Basically, it is just a "here/not here" count. How Kentucky gets away with it is beyond me.

Pretty easily actually. They just report the kids 'present' after their one year in school. APR is a joke.

 

[ursusminor]

Uc

I'm certainly guilty of exaggerating a little here and your central description of the value of a liberal arts education is spot on.

But I do still hold to my contention that a North Carolina scholarship, varsity player can take his (perhaps worthless) degree and get a decent ob.

Would make a fascinating PHD dissertation to quantify this.

The problem seems to be that, when you have trouble articulating what you did in college (nothing) and what your job skills are (you don't have any), maybe, maybe, you get your foot in the door at a job with "just a degree", but you also get fired from any skilled job pretty quickly (because you don't have any job skills). The report that aired on HBO did interview one player who had trouble getting a decent job because his only experience was school, and he couldn't answer the interviewer's questions about what he studied. That directly contradicts your assertion that the degree in and of itself is enough.

 

[msf22b]

The problem seems to be that, when you have trouble articulating what you did in college (nothing) and what your job skills are (you don't have any), maybe, maybe, you get your foot in the door at a job with "just a degree", but you also get fired from any skilled job pretty quickly (because you don't have any job skills). The report that aired on HBO did interview one player who had trouble getting a decent job because his only experience was school, and he couldn't answer the interviewer's questions about what he studied. That directly contradicts your assertion that the degree in and of itself is enough.

You may very well be right
But: one anecdotal incident does not prove your assertion.
As I suggested above, the only way to have a reasonable understanding of the issue
is to study it, survey it, publish and present the evidence in a public forum where it can be subject to scrutiny.
My cynical view may yet prevail, but perhaps not.

 

[wes33]

The stench just keeps getting worse.

http://www.wralsportsfan.com/athlete-advocate-group-files-civil-complaint-against-unc/13547718/

 

[wes33]

From the Duke board.
If i'm UCONN i'm highly agitated with the whole carolina investigation. They were banned for low test scores.Got to give them some credit for at least taking classes and tests. Should they have been punished, Yes. Carolina has evidence against them that courses and professors were fraudulent

 

[wes33]

The heat is spreading around.
http://www.dukebasketballreport.com...s-up-and-gets-potentially-much-more-dangerous

 

[uconnfan68]

From the Duke board.
If i'm UCONN i'm highly agitated with the whole carolina investigation. They were banned for low test scores.Got to give them some credit for at least taking classes and tests. Should they have been punished, Yes. Carolina has evidence against them that courses and professors were fraudulent

NOT banned for low test scores. Discover what the APR is... a sham. It's like US News&World Reports College rankings... SELF REPORTED, and is only present or absent from school, not an academic value. We just didn't lie.