OT UNC academic scandal

[DCwarrior]

So Rashad McCants, whose allegations of academic improprieties at UNC were summarily dismissed outright by many, was substantively correct?

I think those allegations were only dismissed by UNC fans. The response by UNC fans now is that every major D-1 school does the same thing.

[IWB]

How can this be lack of institutional control? Sounds to me like the institution in question did a hell of a job controlling this for close to 20 years!

On the athletic dept not knowing - who sent the email saying that the prof was retiring and all work needed to be done and in before she was gone?

Ted - classic, you may want to invest in wigs.

[TulsaWarrior]

Yep, UNC is still controlling things and has identified two people to blame it all on. UNC administrators need to offer a major in spin control. http://mic.com/articles/102090/detai...tive-oversight

[Alan Bykowski, "brewcity77"]

Dan Bernstein of WSCR in Chicago was talking about this the other day. He's a Duke grad and discussed how the Duke Sociology major was akin to UNC's violations. Maybe not as bad, but a program designed specifically to get Duke's high profile athletes through school with a degree. He also discussed how the professors were culpable and many felt that it was the right thing to do. Granted, the value of that Sociology degree may not be as honest as most Duke degrees, but they still felt they were actually able to offer some semblance of an education to the players.

Of course, this got me thinking about Marquette basketball and Wojo. MU's College of Communications pushes through quite a few basketball players. I routinely saw Diener and Novak at Johnston during my time at MU and on more than one occasion have noticed Communications as the major of MBB athletes when March rolls around. And if Wojo is used to that environment, is there any reason it wouldn't continue (or isn't already) here.

[jpvegas52]

This cuts to the core of the NCAA values. They have always portrayed that the athletes are students first and then athletes. North Carolina should have the book thrown at them for their abuse of the students, where they are just in classes to keep them eligible not to progress toward a degree. I worry about MU with the large number of communications majors among the basketball team. Hopefully, this is not occurring with us.

[TheSultan]

When your constituents care more about winning, and not necessarily about how you win, this is the result. Of course there are degrees of outrage about this. I think most MU basketball fans know that many of the players wouldn't be admitted to the school if they weren't basketball players. I also think most MU fans know that some majors are easier than others and therefore attract these players. I think most MU fans are comfortable with both.

However I think most MU fans would draw the line at some of the UNC accusations. Perhaps not.

[Alan Bykowski, "brewcity77"]

Just to note, I'm not saying our College of Communications is an "athletic degree" or tailor-made to be easier for athletes. I majored in Broadcast & Electronic Communications and there were some classes there that were absolute meat grinders. I just want to note that before we cast too many stones, it isn't completely implausible that this is going on to some degree at our own university.

[Phantom Warrior]

It goes on at every university. When I was at UW as a student, many of the football players took majors in the School of Agriculture. There were so many football players in certain classes that the kids who actually were going to live on farms couldn't get into them.

At some schools it's getting a degree as a phy ed teacher in the School of Education.

That is not the same, however, as what happened at UNC.

[The Reptile]

There is a fine line between sending student athletes to instructor led classes of less rigor than engineering or physical therapy at MU and what happened at UNC. The UNC players were purposely enrolled in classes that they did not have to show up at, had no teacher and only had to submit a paper at the end to get an easy A and credit. With that any GPA issues were solved. While at UNC it was African Studies it could have been any department that was infiltrated and bastardized so the athletic department could get easy grades without showing up.

[jpvegas52]

Articles on the hypocrisy of the NCAA and the concepts of student athlete. I think O'bannon was correct, the athletes are not being compensated for their efforts. The NCAA likes to point out that in lieu of payment, the athletes receive a "world class" education, but statistics tell another story.

http://www.athleticbusiness.com/Gove...ole-story.html

http://www.tulsaworld.com/sportsextr...1aefac0cc.html


Mark Emmert touted that Eighty-two percent of freshman athletes who entered school in 2004-05 earned degrees within six years, according to the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate, which unlike graduation rates recognized by the U.S. Department of Education takes into account student-athletes who transfer from a school but remain on track to graduate somewhere else. The report also indicated that the four-year graduation rate hit 80 percent for the first time ever. Meanwhile, the traditionally lower Federal Graduation Rate hit 65 percent, a record high for athletes, compared with 63 percent for all other college students.

But Richard Southall, associate professor of sport management at the University of North Carolina and director of the College Sport Research Institute, read the headlines and saw more spin than substance. "In today's age of Twitter, everybody wants a simple headline, and the NCAA supplies it," Southall says. "They say, 'Athletes graduate at a higher rate,' and everybody can feel good about it, because, after all, that's what we really want."

Neither does Jason Lanter, a Kutztown University psychology professor and current president of The Drake Group, an academic-integrity advocacy organization that counts educational disclosure among its founding principles. "Without looking at disclosure, without looking at the idea of transparency and what's really going on with the education, we don't know what type of education these athletes are really getting," Lanter says. "Are they being steered toward certain courses, majors, faculty? Are they really having educational freedom to choose what they want to do?"

Clustering, a term academics use to describe situations in which 25 percent or more of a student-athlete population is pursuing the same major, has jumped in the past five years, according to Lanter. "Personally, I don't have a problem with certain student groups selecting certain majors, assuming they do it because they're truly interested in the major," he says. "But are they being routed toward a certain major and taking certain courses just because they're easy? We really need to look at the academic freedom and integrity of the athletes and detail the rigor associated with the academic programs in which they're involved."

CSRI reports focused on the two most prominent college sports point out another way in which numbers released by the NCAA are favorably skewed. "They aggregate all athletes together," Southall says, "and the fact of the matter is that when looking at the demographic profile of tennis and golf and lacrosse and soccer, those are much more highly qualified students than most football or men's basketball players." (The NCAA's record numbers may also be explained, in part, by the fact that Ivy League schools, which don't award scholarships, were factored into the mix for the first time.)

"What really is happening is that athletes are being funneled into the majors of least resistance," said Oklahoma professor Gerald Gurney, president of The Drake Group, an NCAA watchdog. "They really, based on their athletic commitment, do not have an opportunity to pursue an education at all, much less a world-class education." "I think what is being seen is marginal students being forced to commit academic dishonesty or the universities are joining them in an effort to keep them eligible and retaining them."

This educational dishonesty cuts to the core of what the NCAA tries to portray. This is why North Carolina deserves to be punished severely for this. The real victims are the student athletes who are being cheated out of an education and used by the university, if they don't receive an education they should be paid.