On Dec 29, 2008, at 11:15 AM, Woody wrote: > AJC investigation: Many athletes lag far behind on SAT scores > > By MIKE KNOBLER > > The Atlanta Journal-Constitution > > Sunday, December 28, 2008 > > Football and men's basketball players on the nation's big-time > college teams averaged hundreds of points lower on their SATs than > their classmates, and some of the gaps are so large they call into > question the lengths to which schools will go to win. > > > <snip> > Hewitt says the only fair comparison is between athletes and other > students with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Seen that way, he > argues, athletics programs perform very well. Black athletes, for > example, graduate at higher rates than black students as a whole. > > "To insinuate that athletics has caused this problem of poor > graduation rates [among black students] is wrong," Hewitt said. >
This appears to me to hit on the real problem with this type of investigation; simply put - correlation does not prove causation. 55% of all student athletes are minorities, the composition of the student body as a whole is quite different. For such an "investigation" to have any sort of merit, the composition of the student body should have been normalized to match the student-athlete pool. Otherwise, we may be observing an issue related to social or economic background and mislabeling it as an athletics problem. -Zeb --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ GATORS: ONE VOICE ON SATURDAY - NO VOICE ON SUNDAY! 1996 National Football Champions | 2006 National Basketball Champions 2006 National Football Champions | 2007 National Basketball Champions Three Heisman Trophy winners: Steve Spurrier (1966), Danny Wuerffel (1996), Tim Tebow (2007) - Visit our website at www.gatornet.us -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
