OT: UGA Admin. Standards
if you can fog the mirror enough for the counseler to write 'approved' with his/her finger, you are in! congrats!
You are focusing on how he was admitted without ever reading a book. What you should be asking is how he was able to graduate from high school without reading a book. This happens because people will manipulate the system to make sure guys are elgible. In poorer communities, sports are seen as one of the few ways to advance yourself in life. Because of this, K-12 teachers don't want to be the one that kills a kids athletic career and as a result they pass kids along through the system. This sets a culture where these young athletes see underpreparred students getting into schools just on sports, which give them a perception that school isn't that important.
Be a good athlete. Meet NCAA minimum qualification standards, which is a 2.3 Core GPA (C+ average) and an SAT of 900 or ACT SUM of 75 (18.75 average). Ironically the higher your core GPA the worse your SAT or ACT score can be based on a sliding scale.
Either way if you can get a C+ average in high school and score a 900 on the SAT then you can get into any D1 college for sports, with the exception of Stanford and Northwestern.
I can see the logic behind the sliding scale. The more you've proven yourself in the classroom, the less you need to prove on the test. The worse your grades are, the more you need to come through on test day, to demonstrate that you have the ability to survive in a college classroom.
Stanford and Northwestern aren't the only schools with standards above the minimum though. Some schools have particular requirements, such as a larger number of core classes taken than the NCAA minimum (13).
I think the NCAA minimum is 16 core classes now.
March 20th, 2017 at 11:08 PM ^
I understand that logic as well. However instead of having a hard threshold this sliding scale creates an incentive to try to inflate your core GPA through online courses, lenient teachers, etc. The idea that a kid with a 3.5 high school GPA would get a 420 SAT or have a 39 ACT SUM (9.75 average) is ridiculous.
And from what I've been told by NCAA coaches I've met is that Michigan's admissions committee negotiates with the coaching staff on players. I.e. they will let in NCAA minimum athletes but the coaches must recruit another kid who scores higher than NCAA mins so that the team's overall "average" admitted athlete is above a certain level acceptable to the admissions committee. The point being that if the coaches want you bad enough you can get in with NCAA minimum scores. Obviously this is easy for the football team since they will have ~20 kids each year and not all will be 5 stars. There is a reason why the 3 star guys tend to come from Catholic league schools, their scores will be good enough to average out the 5 star guys who aren't as academically stellar. This is also another thing that RRod got into trouble with during his tenure here. He kept sending too many low score kids the admissions committee and they got upset. Clearly WVU doesn't have such standards and they'll let an entire class of NCAA min kids in.
Stanford admissions on the other hand doesn't make such a bargain with their coaching staff and they will reject all players that don't meet their admission standards. The Stanford coaches I've met say this puts them at a big disadvantage because while Oregon and offer a kid early and know they will get in Stanford needs to constantly monitor their academic progress and can get burned if a kid doesn't perform academically. This results in Stanford coming in late after they know a recruits academic profile.
Honestly I don't know the specifics at Northwestern, but I'd imagine they are closer to the Stanford model of athletic admissions than they are to the Michigan model.
Yeah. The Ivies lower their standards quite a bit for athletes, which is odd given that they don't compete at the highest level in most sports.
March 21st, 2017 at 10:06 AM ^
My source is a current coach there so I'm pretty sure it is accurate. Perhaps I didn't clarify enough. The admissions board at Stanford won't take an NCAA minimum kid period. They may take a kid who wouldn't otherwise qualify if not for athletics, but that kid is still a good candidate.
The anecdote that the coach relayed to me was that they secured a verbal commitment from a kid very early, freshman year of high school. They knew the kid was borderline academically for Stanford (well above NCAA minimums), but they were a very good recruit and had a long relationship so the coaching staff rolled the dice. Senior year rolled around and the admission committee rejected that kid because their grades/scores weren't good enough. So long story short that kid ended up at Oregon and is a major contributer there.
Now you contrast that with Michigan's approach, where they will take an NCAA minimum kid so long as the coaching staff recruits others who are above NCAA minimums so that the class average is above NCAA minimums.
Bottom line being that if a coach at Michigan wants an NCAA minimum qualified kid bad enough they will get accepted into UM. At Stanford that is not the case.
So if the semantics are does Stanford "lower" their standards for atheletes, the technical answer is likely yes. But the degree to which they do is significantly less than other schools, Michigan included. the coaches at Stanford can't take a kid with a 2.5 GPA and a 900 SAT score into the admissions board and get him through. Stanford admissions will flat out reject that kid. Michigan admissions will say OK, but you need to give us another kid with a 3.7 GPA and a 1400 SAT to balance it out. MSU admissions would say yeah no problem, they meet NCAA mins.
This is why Harbaugh was correct when he made his Statements about Michigan back in 2007. He said that Michigan's athletic department has ways of getting borderline guys accepted. That is clearly true.
Literally just read this to my son tonight.
March 20th, 2017 at 11:16 PM ^
You are a cruel, cruel parent.
March 21st, 2017 at 11:09 AM ^
There's a lot of lessons to take away from it - some positive, some negative. Never really noticed it as a kid - but I do now.
The creepiest book to me when I was a kid was Where the Wild Things Are - while the book is great the drawings of the monsters gave me nightmares when I was younger. It is what it is.
March 20th, 2017 at 10:27 PM ^
March 20th, 2017 at 10:31 PM ^
March 21st, 2017 at 10:46 AM ^
You literally don't know what you're missing.
March 20th, 2017 at 10:00 PM ^
March 20th, 2017 at 11:19 PM ^
March 20th, 2017 at 11:26 PM ^
makes me sad, and yet at the same time, explains so much.
He never read a book on his own, but he could read, if not very well and just barely enough to handle tests and school work. That sounds like about 75% of the people I went to high school with and a whole bunch of them did just fine even without college and I am sure if they had the athletic gifts of this young man they would have been fine in college as well. Some people just don't enjoy reading, aren't given the tools to appreciate it, and aren't exposed to it at home as something to enjoy and value. Frankly, if I had to rely on English class for the books that were supposed to teach me a love of reading I would have hated it as well.
The real story here is through connections made while at Georgia he developed a love of reading(admittedly it was on his own and through joining a ladies book club) but I doubt it would have happened had he not been in Athens. So in essence it seems like you're telling me it's better he not have had that opportunity, not sure that's a good look either.
I'm sure you had many leather-bound books and your childhood home smelled of rich mahogany, but not everyone is so fortunate. The dude bettered his life through athletics and is now giving back, and he has UGA to thank for that. I highly doubt anyone is lining up to apologize for this situation.
I've volunteered with a local Chicago organization called Bernie's Book Bank, whose mission it is to get books into the hands of at-risk schoolkids.
A few facts, showing that we (assuming most of us are at least middle class) easily take reading and access to books for granted/
http://berniesbookbank.org/about/childrens-literacy/
- Children who struggle in vain with reading in the first grade soon decide that they neither like nor want to read. Juel, 1998
- Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare. BegintoRead.com
- In middle-income neighborhoods the ratio of books per child is 13 to 1, in low-income neighborhoods, the ratio is 1 age-appropriate book for every 300 children. Neuman, Susan B. and David K. Dickinson, ed. Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Volume 2. New York, NY: 2006, p. 31.
- 61 percent of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. Reading Literacy in the United States, 1996.
- A single, brief exposure to good reading material can result in a clear increase in enthusiasm for reading. Ramos and Krashen, 1998; Cho and Krashen, 2002
March 21st, 2017 at 11:14 AM ^
what are facts 6 and 7?
Update: I went to the link, thanks. It pays to read.
If you need a reason to bang on Georgia use their FOIA philosophy. That's worth banging on.
March 21st, 2017 at 11:09 AM ^
The fact that he hadn't read a complete book doesn't mean he couldn't read perfectly well. Lots of people, many with college degrees, don't read books.
March 21st, 2017 at 11:38 AM ^