2015 Academic Progress Reports

What are the schools doing in class?
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It gets easily forgotten, but this is college football. Of course, college football is nothing more than a glorified minor league, but the guys still have to go to class and at least pretend to try.

Welcome to the Academic Progress Reports, better known as the APR, taking a look at the classes from 2009-2010 to 2013-2014. Every Division I sports team calculates its APR each academic year, based on the eligibility, retention and graduation of each scholarship student-athlete. Programs that score below 930 (this is the Mendoza line - if you can't hit this, you're just not trying) on their four-year rate, or 940 over the last two years, can be penalized in a variety of ways from practice restrictions to financial aid losses to to coaching penalites to loss of post-season eligiblity. Making it even tougher, the former low point for really getting hammered was 900, and now it's up to 930.

Below are the rankings for the FBS teams based on their APR and with our scoring for how they graded out. We categorized the teams into ten categories. If a program was in the 90-100% range, it gets a 10 (for our Program Rankings to come out later this summer), while a program that finished in the 1-10% range gets a 1.

10 is obviously amazing, anything 7 or above is fantastic, and 4 or below is miserable.

Most Improved Schools from 2014 Report to 2015
1. Louisville +30
2. UTEP +26
3. Maryland +23
4. Michigan, ULM, Cincinnati +18

5 Biggest Freefallers from 2014 Report to 2015
1. Georgia Southern -15
2. Kansas -14
3. TCU -9
4. Wake Forest -8
5. Boise State, New Mexico -7

://cfn.scout.com/2/1549930.html

Thanks for posting.

May 27, 2015
An institutional record 17 University of Notre Dame athletic teams earned perfect 1,000 scores--more perfect scores than any other NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision school--in the annual set of Academic Progress Rate statistics issued today by the NCAA.

All 26 Irish athletics programs again exceeded the NCAA's APR minimum standards.

Notre Dame's number of perfect scores of 1,000 has ranked either first or second among all FBS programs for 10 straight years. Leaders in the 2015 data released today are Notre Dame with 17, Stanford (15), Northwestern (12), Boston College (10), Duke (nine), Minnesota (eight), Arizona State, Vanderbilt and Tulane (seven each) and Illinois, North Carolina, Penn State and Rice (six each).

Notre Dame also led the FBS schools in 1,000 scores in 2013 and 2012 (both with 12), in 2009 (with nine), in 2008 (with eight, tied with Duke) and in 2006 (with 14, tied with Boston College). Notre Dame finished second in number of 1,000 scores in 2014, 2011, 2010 and 2007.



http://www.und.com/genrel/052715aab.html

Ucf at 18. Just saying

The bar needs to be raised even higher.

I hate the APR. I really do. I think that it's well-intentioned, but the execution is terrible. I think that the APR scores show the degree to which student athletes are students, the degree to which schools cheat, or a combination of both. The scores do not show how much the students learn, what they take (fake classes v. calc II/O-chem/physics/etc.), or how ready they are for the working world. Unfortunately, that distinction is lost on most. A passing grade for a physics major at GT is much harder to obtain than a passing grade for a philosophy major at Penn State. Holding both schools to the same standard is a joke.

Like I said, the system is well-intentioned, but its execution is terrible. It really, really needs to be redesigned.