So while the concept of a true student-athlete is dying throughout much of Division I college athletics, it’s very much alive and well in the Ivy League. So you can see, at Harvard coach can only recruit from a very, very small subset of the players that are available to the rest of the Division I schools. In other words, 95% of college-bound kids will score higher than that. That’s somewhere around the 5th percentile. To be eligible with a 3.0 GPA, a recruit has to have a combined 620 on the math and verbal sections of the SAT. According to the table published by the NCAA, there is a sliding scale of GPA and SAT scores. How does that compare with the minimum requirements established by the NCAA? Most Division I athletic programs only require an athlete to meet the NCAA standards to be an eligible recruit. That’s going to put him in the top 15-20% of all college-bound students in the US. That puts him around 200 for the Academic Index, depending on his GPA. Wesley Saunders, for example, the workhorse of the Harvard squad, was over 1800 on the SAT according to an ESPN article. If Harvard chose to recruit from a bigger pool of basketball players, for example, they could go after some players with lower Index scores, but they have to balance it out with higher index athletes. Since we’re talking about the entire group of athletes falling within that range, that means that some lower index athletes can be recruited, as long as they are balanced by a higher recruit. What does a 210 AI look like in terms of test scores and GPA? That’s about 680 per section on the SAT(2040 total) or a 30 composite ACT, along with a 3.7 unweighted GPA.Īs admissions become more and more selective at Harvard, the academic standards for athletes rise accordingly. So if the typical Harvard (non-athlete) student index of 225 (estimated), the typical Harvard athlete would have an AI around 210 (estimated). Standard deviation, in case your stats knowledge is rusty, is a measure of the variation in a set of data values, in this case Academic Index scores. This number is calculated for the entire student body at each Ivy League school and the scores of the recruited athletes, taken as a group, must be within 1 standard deviation of that score. The Academic Index is calculated using a formula that takes into account SAT scores, ACT score and High School GPA. The tool for evaluating academics is called the Academic Index. The purpose of this is to make sure the athletes on campus are academically similar to the rest of the student body. Throughout the Ivy League, there is a common agreement that specifies the academics required for incoming athletic recruits. As Harvard admissions have become more selective, test scores of the average student have risen and as a consequence the academic standard for Harvard athletes has also risen. Well, as it turns out, Harvard hasn’t relaxed academic standards for athletes. One of the announcers said something to the effect of, ‘since Harvard has relaxed their academic standards for athletes, they’ve really turned things around.’ I was watching the first round of NCAA Basketball and Harvard played a great game against New Mexico.
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