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Before Recruiting in Ivy League, Applying Some Math
Tim Shaffer for the New York Times
By BILL PENNINGTON
Published: December 24, 2011
The Ivy League, which is experiencing an athletic revival with several teams ranked nationally, is a doggedly atypical N.C.A.A. Division I sports conference. For starters, the eight members are virtual heretics in the landscape of American big-time college sports for fielding about 280 teams in 35 sports without athletic scholarships. The league also restricts activities like off-season practices, discourages weekday games and prohibits postseason play in football.
But there is one thing the Ivy League does that truly sets it apart from its sporting brethren nationwide: it tracks and scrutinizes the finite, detailed academic credentials of every recruited athlete welcomed through the doors of the eight member institutions. And it has done so for more than 25 years — creating a dossier of grades and test scores for more than 40,000 student-athletes.
To accomplish this, the league came up with a measurement called the Academic Index, which gives all prospective high school recruits a number, roughly from 170 to 240, that summarizes their high school grade-point averages and scores on standardized tests like the SAT.
The index number of every admitted recruit is shared among the member institutions to guarantee that no vastly underqualified recruit has been admitted at a rival institution and to allow member universities to compare classwide index averages for athletes against similar averages for the overall student body.
Full Hundred
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/sp...h.html?_r=1&hp
Tim Shaffer for the New York Times
By BILL PENNINGTON
Published: December 24, 2011
The Ivy League, which is experiencing an athletic revival with several teams ranked nationally, is a doggedly atypical N.C.A.A. Division I sports conference. For starters, the eight members are virtual heretics in the landscape of American big-time college sports for fielding about 280 teams in 35 sports without athletic scholarships. The league also restricts activities like off-season practices, discourages weekday games and prohibits postseason play in football.
But there is one thing the Ivy League does that truly sets it apart from its sporting brethren nationwide: it tracks and scrutinizes the finite, detailed academic credentials of every recruited athlete welcomed through the doors of the eight member institutions. And it has done so for more than 25 years — creating a dossier of grades and test scores for more than 40,000 student-athletes.
To accomplish this, the league came up with a measurement called the Academic Index, which gives all prospective high school recruits a number, roughly from 170 to 240, that summarizes their high school grade-point averages and scores on standardized tests like the SAT.
The index number of every admitted recruit is shared among the member institutions to guarantee that no vastly underqualified recruit has been admitted at a rival institution and to allow member universities to compare classwide index averages for athletes against similar averages for the overall student body.
Full Hundred
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/sp...h.html?_r=1&hp
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