This is just beyond sketchy. UNC hires outside people to evaluate...what, exactly? Getting to that, but they came to the conclusion that the athletes were testing at or above college level? After a reading specialist uses data from a different UNC-hired psychologist (who they've since fired...) to suggest their reading levels are primary school level? And the big kicker is: according to Willingham, they didn't even use the original raw scores to come to their conclusion. Anyone who has performed any kind of diagnostic screen or evaluation knows that interpreting data starts with the raw scores. You have literally nothing without them. What they did was unethical at best. It's a disgrace that two of these outside hires came from excellent academic institutions with great reputations in the realm of research. They also didn't analyse the validity of the test battery. This is basic level here: it's taking a raw score, converting it to a standard score, and comparing it to the mean. And it's not like there's a two- or three-grade-equivalency discrepancy between reports, which are the kind of scores that are not the most reliable. They're making an incredibly large distinction here, for a bunch of kids who needed special consideration for admission, and were receiving reading screenings in the first place, which is kind of sketchy in and of itself.
