CU Releases APR Report & Information

BOULDER ? The NCAA has instituted a report card system termed Academic Progress Rate (APR), and member schools supplied information for the 2003-04 academic year as basis for an initial look at how schools are faring across the country.

No penalties apply at this time; after two years of APR data collection, contemporaneous penalties may apply, and after three years, historical penalties can be implemented. A team's penalties may include losing up to 10 percent of its scholarships. Programs affected would be those who do not attain a 925 average score on data submitted for the analysis period.

Including "confidence boundaries" for teams with smaller squad sizes, 16 of CU's 17 intercollegiate sport programs have attained at least a 925 score, which corresponds statistically to a 50 percent graduation rate.

The only program not to reach the 925 mark in the trial run was men's basketball; four others were in good standing when the confidence boundary was applied.

"This preliminary APR data from the NCAA is a great teaching tool for our sport programs as more pieces of the NCAA Academic Reform efforts are put into place," CU associate athletic director Karen Morrison said. "It has finally put into real numbers the theory that has been talked about for the last couple of years."

The APR system is complicated, but can best be described as one that is based on two factors: eligibility/graduation and retention. Each student-athlete accrues 0, 1 or 2 points per semester; if he or she is in good academic standing, including on-schedule progress toward a degree, and if they are enrolled, they receive two points; if they are one and not the other, they earn a single point, and if neither, zero.

For example, if a team was comprised of 20 student-athletes, and all 20 were in good academic standing and returned to school the next semester, the team's semester APR would be 1000 (40 out of a 40 possible points). The next semester, if two became ineligible, one left school and one stayed, and the other 18 remained in good standing, the semester APR would be 925 (37 of 40). The team's APR for the year would thus be 963 (for 77 out of 80 possible points).

Three sports, men's golf, men's skiing and women's volleyball earned perfect 1000 scores. Scores for other sports: women's golf (976), men's tennis (962), women's track & field (956), women's skiing (947) and football (936). Programs that are in good standing including the confidence boundary were women's soccer (919), men's track & field (918), women's basketball (914) and women's tennis (906).

Men's basketball earned 44 of 54 points, or an 815 APR figure; one player who left after the fall 2003 semester and two others after the spring 2004 semester were not in good academic standing upon their departure and accounted for six of the 10 lost points.

The track & field numbers were inclusive of the three disciplines and were computed for outdoor track; in breaking the sport down, APR figures were as follows: women's indoor (957), men's indoor (918), women's cross country (979) and men's cross country (934). These augmented numbers will be included when the NCAA updates this information at the end of March after corrections can be submitted from around the country. The APR numbers for CU's outdoor track programs will not change.

The department as a whole had a 937 figure (951 on eligibility/graduation and 923 on retention); CU officials expect all three numbers to go up once the separate indoor track and cross country numbers are submitted. Nationally, the average was 938 for public institutions and 944 for all of Division I.