OT: UNC leaders to get report Wednesday on academic scandal

[David 76]

Don't see how the "no attendance" classes won't bite them. Didn't we see one of McCants' papers? It was a joke. I think they will be punished. If they don't find anything, it will be because they don't want to.

 

[ctchamps]

I agree the AD used these classes specifically to keep otherwise ineligible "students" eligible. But, every college has easy classes and the students who want to find those classes, or instructors, will find them, tell there friends and every semester people will flock to them. Now, none of these will pass people for a single paper written by someone else, or not require any contact with the staff. So, UNC's goose is pretty much cooked in that respect, but the existence of easy classes in of itself isn't that uncommon. I've seen classes where attendance and multiple choice tests comprise the grade, others where a single project is the basis for the grade. You can also rack up elective credits though short session classes, even classes that meet only once or twice. It's also not unusual for athletes to cluster into the same classes. One, they are not there primarily for their education, UNC doesn't have a monopoly on that. Second, there are very real scheduling issues when you are on an athletic team.

I had one independent study course, that the dept allowed me to substitute for a class that everyone, and I mean everyone, hated. The IS syllabus? Design a modification for a piece of testing equipment that the school used for outside paid consulting work. At the end of the day, it was some research, a few meetings, a brief write up and couple of drawings that I handed off to next guys who eventually built and tested the thing. If I'm an athlete, is that special treatment? Or is it an astute understanding of the student handbook?

You are correct about the general availability of ace courses. I would bet anything that UConn's goose was cooked with the APR problem because there was little, if any, attempt to provide flexibility with the courses UConn athletes could take. Take any cross section of thing and look at the anomalies. There has to be a common sense answer to things.

 

[sledog]

Mushie has his issues, but he did finger the collective of sportswriters as culpable.

 

[upstater]

You are correct about the general availability of ace courses. I would bet anything that UConn's goose was cooked with the APR problem because there was little, if any, attempt to provide flexibility with the courses UConn athletes could take. Take any cross section of thing and look at the anomalies. There has to be a common sense answer to things.

I don't know anything about UConn's courses, but clearly it was the transfer and leaving early for the pros issue that hurt UConn's APR.

I just looked at that NCAA report on graduation last week. With this new GSR (Grad Success Rate) metric, they are graduating a lot of kids. Or not. I saw UCF fans crowing about a great grad rate. 88% of basketball kids. Then you look at their actual grad rate: 0%.

Phony.

This is like Kentucky graduating one of its 13 scholarship players. If one kid graduates and the others are exempt, then UK's GSR is 100%. Actual grad rate? Less than 10%.

 

[pj]

The irony is that te APR system will probably motivate many schools to to do this sort of thing (albeit not this blatantly) just to avoid a postseason ban.

More likely: Everyone was doing this, and so the APR system could be safely implemented without fear it would catch any major schools in its net.

 

[DarthGrumpy]

Meanwhile, I wonder if the UNC Athletic Department has given old Sepp Blatter at FIFA a call. Afterall, UNC may be interested in the legality of conducting a comprehensive internal investigative report and the suppressing the final report and findings because of the legal damage that the report may have on certain executives whose privacy must be protected, i.e. guilty as sin.

 

[amory]

UNC's collective response to all this has been maybe the most surprising part of the entire scandal.

Roy Williams:

"I know what we've done and what we didn't do, and I'm proud of what I've done and I'm proud of what I didn't do. I'm 64, so I'm not close to being ready to quit, but you also think, 'God, I don't want this to be what people remember about me."

and

"You can say I'm too short, too ugly, too much gray hair, that I have a bad golf swing, but there's not one fricking person in the world that can say that I never emphasize the academic side of it. If they say that, they're lying or whatever. I'm as proud of my ethics as I could possibly be."

Like, what? What?? I get trying to distance yourself in an effort to keep your job. But you can do that without acting like you're some kind of champion for preserving the "student" in student-athlete. He comes off looking like an insane person. Maybe he really didn't know about any of this, but if that's the case he wasn't paying attention at all and certainly wasn't emphasizing academics.

Then you see their fans completely dismissing the idea that this reflects on their athletics department in any way. They'd actually rather throw the school's academic system under the bus before their teams, despite the fact that a bunch of them have diplomas from UNC. What the hell is going on down there?

 

[UConniki]

I'ts the SOUTH !!!!!!!!!!!!!! We've lived in Fl. since 2000, the schools are terrible,in middle school if you get c's one year you're automatically placed in advanced courses the next year, the bar is set very low. Sports (football) are everything(fl.state)!!!!!!!!!