Wait, Alabama has academic standards?
Isheem Young enters transfer portal
- Thread starter Chipper
- Start date
Wait, Alabama has academic standards?
No and I'm not sure it has for a while. Sure there have been some exceptions, but when is the last time you heard an athlete on campus was declared ineligible? It happens a bit more with recruits.
But the use of standardized tests like ACT/SAT will be gone within a few years to qualify athletes. Once athletes are on campus, pretty tough for an athlete to screw up with tutoring and ability to direct athletes into "easier" degree programs.
De-emphasizing the ACT/SAT is probably not a bad thing and give schools some autonomy on who they admit.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
Pretty sure there are workarounds. I've turned in Ds and Fs for players before and then watched them appear on the field.
As a note, people getting Ds and Fs simply because they just don't do the work usually do it across the board in all their courses. Somehow, they were all eligible.
Agree
On this issue, I am a grumpy old man.
Any pretensions of “amateur student athlete” are almost wiped out - from a regulatory standpoint. Yes, the majority of the kids go to class and get their degrees. I am not knocking the kids. I think our coaches all do a great job of demanding excellence on and off the floor. But, it certainly is getting easier for a rogue program to shortcut academics (North Carolina Basketball ?) in the upcoming pay for play environment.
Yet somehow it is spun as doing it for the athlete. Letting them slide through grade school, high school and college is developing bad habits for that day when they miss the NFL and have to work for a living. I feel bad for those kids.
I'm in favor of pitching the ACT/SAT stuff for college. If people want to base scholarships on it, that is their choice. I have seen too many times a high ACT person do poorly due to work skills and general ability and also seen poor test takers really excel in school and work. They just aren't a great standardized test taker.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
Right. The non-revenue sports are very thorough in what they expect of athletes, and what they want reported.
The revenue sports were the ones where this happened.
My favorite exam ever came from a football player in the Rhoads days. He sat for 37 minutes waiting for someone else to turn theirs in first. Then he brought his up. I asked him how it went (because it didn't look like he was writing a whole lot), and he said "Went good."
When he left, I broke my personal rule and opened it up. His answer: "I don't know. I didn't study this ****."
Dude was honest. Based on his play, he didn't study there, either.
Didn't even follow the time test rule of at least make an effort and it will get you a couple points here and there. I remember forgetting a test so I study hammered a couple key sections that I figured would get me to a passing grade and then I did my best to grab those effort points on the rest to push it to a 70% area so it wouldn't blow my whole grade up.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
There was a bit of a challenge deciding how high or low in the F range he should go. Write down enough points to give him a chance to redeem himself later, or just bury him with the score he deserved?
I aimed somewhere in the middle, but it didn't matter. He blew off enough other stuff and plagiarized a big assignment, so nothing really mattered.
I am morbidly curious as to who this was but don’t need to know
I did some tutoring for a couple years while Mac and Floyd were here. Oddly the basketball players had the upcoming test in hand to use as a "study guide." The football players seemed like they had to slog it out like a regular student. I was impressed with the football guys - the couple I had were not NFL guys, but starters at DB and LB. They were pretty smart guys, worked hard and got legit As in econ 101 and 102. They clearly knew the material.
As for the basketball players, I'm not sure what grades they got. Considering they remained eligible and from what I experienced they were...generous.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
Oh, yeah. If every basketball player were Melvin Ejim, it would seem more legit. I remember noting during Fred's days that a huge # of our guys were in the same program. Of course, the news of non-legit classes at UNC were coming out, so I have questions here that I suspect I know the answer to.
A friend of mine went to KU to finish his PhD. I know that he has stories about dealing with their athletic department, but he doesn't want to spell it out.
Tutors can be all over the board. My daughter had an econ tutor for part of this semester. Part because she said she learned nothing in her session, and said several were dropping the tutoring for the same reason. Apparently the students would go to the session and ask questions but the tutor would instead go over what she thought was important even when it wasn't a key component that the instructor said would be on the exam. She was making it her own little class
Last trimester in high school my daughter had a teacher who would talk about nothing but racism in class even though the material rarely had anything to do with it. He all but called her a racist when she mentioned that she had no idea what was going to be on the test because they never talked about the course material. Of course the exams were over the material they were supposed to be covering. When she went to her advisor with her concern she barely started mentioned that she was having a problem with a teacher not covering the material and the advisor said she knew who she was having a problem with and that she knew my daughter would have problems when he was on her schedule. Problem teacher that has been there for decades.
Best thing as a parent there is to teach her about life in general and how those type of things can happen in your life. Not what you want for your kid but unfortunately about all you can do in those points
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see where Young lands.
