Reform effects
On football
There are many questions regarding how the NCAA will enforce the new policy for football. The Bowl Championship Series is its own entity and decides the college football postseason, thus making them the governing body for college football. President Gary Ransdell said there is uncertainty on how the new standard relates to the BCS. "The BCS is an independently run enterprise, yet it involves NCAA member institutions," he said. "So does this 930 rule also determine eligibility for BCS games? I think that's yet to be ironed out."[12]
Some NCAA institutions participate in football leagues, other than the BCS, which are organized by the NCAA and these reforms would apply to. In the 2011-12 academic year there were 17 teams in the FBS league with APRs below 930 and 37 teams in the FCS league. If these programs do not find a way to improve their APR then they will suffer postseason bans.[13]
On men's basketball
The APR's flaws are highlighted in men's basketball. "Syracuse's Jim Boeheim suffered the two-scholarship hit last summer, and in doing so publicly upbraided the APR for taking into account the departures of Eric Devendorf, Jonny Flynn and Paul Harris for the NBA draft, all three of whom left campus to prepare for the NBA event without fulfilling their spring semester requirements."[14] Many college basketball players leave before they graduate, and the ones that leave in bad academic standing cause the APR to go down. This issue is seen throughout college basketball.
To exemplify this phenomenon for collegiate basketball, if the 930 postseason ban had been in effect for the 2011-12 season then 99 teams would have received postseason bans.[13] Clearly, the new postseason policy must become a high priority for basketball programs or many of them will not be competing in NCAA sponsored championships
Potential Misinterpretations
While the numbers represented in the APR have a certain significance, there can be misrepresentations for people unfamiliar with what the APR is showing. For example, the APR only applies to students that receive athletic financial aid, which is by no means all varsity athletes at a university.[19] NCAA's 1,265 member colleges and universities report that they have more than 355,000 student-athletes playing each year. Approximately 36% of these NCAA student-athletes receive a share of the $1 billion earmarked for athletic scholarships.[20] Another common misuse of the data occurs when APR results are compared between universities. This is usually not a valid comparison unless it is viewed alongside the graduation rates for non athletes at the institution. For example, one institution may have an APR representing that only 50% of athletes are on track to graduate which seems like athletes are under performing at the university. However, if the graduation rate for non-athletes is also 50% then the low graduation rate for the athletes is not a student-athlete problem, but a university wide problem.[21] Furthermore, it is not always relevant to compare APR scores across universities because the academic rigors between universities differ. For example, at some high performing academic universities freshman struggle with eligibility because the workload is hard to deal with initially, but in the end, those students find academic success.[17]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Progress_Rate
