A.I. for athletes at Dartmouth

Colleges & Universities Dartmouth College
6

<p>Here is a entry from biggreenalertblog.</p>

<p><a href=“http://biggreenalertblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/playing-game-with-chris-lincoln.html[/url]”>http://biggreenalertblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/playing-game-with-chris-lincoln.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Chris Lincoln, a former recruited athlete and dean’s list student at Middlebury College, is the author of PLAYING THE GAME: Inside Athletic Recruiting in the Ivy League, published in 2004 by Nomad Press. Chris, who just appeared on Rick Wolff’s WFAN radio show The Sports Edge, generously took the time recently for this exclusive Q&A with Green Alert. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I met several times to talk with Chris about the book and traded numerous emails with him regarding issues he wrote about.)</p>

<p>Some questions include:</p>

<p>What is the Academic Index supposed to do, and does it work?</p>

<p>The Academic Index (A.I.) is used to determine if an athlete’s academic standing is representative of an Ivy League institution’s student body as a whole. All entering Ivy League students are assigned an A.I., which is based on a mathematical formula—two-thirds test scores, one third class rank or GPA (if the high school doesn’t rank). Each school’s “mean” A.I. is based on a rolling four year average. The trouble with the A.I. is that it cannot measure intangibles (character, drive, ambition) and it discriminates against kids who either don’t test well or lack the financial resources to enroll in expensive test-prep courses. Under current Ivy rules, football is treated on its own, while all other Ivy sports must have a combined average A.I. for incoming recruits that is within one standard deviation of the mean A.I. of the whole school.</p>

<p>Is there something better?</p>

<p>I favor having an A.I. floor, under which no athlete can be admitted. After that, I support what the late Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti wanted to do: let each school admit the class they want to admit. The trouble is, as coaches at several Ivy schools agreed, “Nobody trusts each other in this League.” So if a school starts winning, and there’s nothing regulating the admission of athletes, it’s because admissions has opened the doors too wide. Part of me wonders if the League has made the whole A.I. as complex as it is just to keep people from trying to unravel it. Your head can start spinning when you get into it, so the tendency is to throw up your hands and say, “Okay, whatever—nothing’s simple in the Ivy league.” But ultimately the schools need to become more transparent. They need to find the right way to treat athletes, not worry that they are being treated differently. Admit it and make it an ethical process.</p>

<p>A lot of posters on Internet message boards try to group the Ivy schools by admissions standards. Some will put Harvard, Princeton and Yale in one group, Columbia and Dartmouth in the next, and Brown, Penn and Cornell in a third group. How accurate is that, and if it’s not, can you break the schools into three groups?</p>

<p>When I was researching my book back in 2003-2004, everyone I asked grouped the Ivy schools into three groups: Harvard, Princeton and Yale; Dartmouth close on their heels; then Columbia, Penn, Brown and Cornell. You’d have to check the most recent issue of the college marketing bible, US News & World Report, to get the latest rankings, but in the recruiting game, the top three Ivies enjoy a distinct advantage, especially with the parents of athletes. “We lose kids to Dartmouth and Penn,” one coach told me. “We lose parents to Harvard, Princeton and Yale.” Several Ivy people commented to me (and not for attribution) that there was a big difference between the academic quality of schools like Princeton, Harvard and Yale and some of the other Ivies lower on the scale. “It’s an athletic conference,” said one of these folks, “not an academic conference. It’s a big mistake to lump these schools equally on an academic basis. But of course the weaker schools love it.” Nothing like Ivy League snobbery, eh?</p>

<p>There have been numerous stories around Dartmouth about athletes turned down by Dartmouth but accepted at HYP and Columbia. Is it true the Dartmouth admissions director has said there’s no truth to those stories? Have you heard any of those stories and if they are true, how does it happen?</p>

<p>I don’t know what Dean Furstenberg has said about the truth of these stories, but I do know of cases where players were rejected by Dartmouth and wound up at other Ivies—in one case at Columbia (as an Ivy Player of the Year in men’s basketball), in another case at Harvard (as a men’s soccer captain). I also know that a men’s soccer player was turned down at Dartmouth and went on to become a first team All-American at Stanford. Last year, a recruit was turned down by Dartmouth in early decision, and he’s now playing lacrosse at Yale. I’m sure there are other cases as well. This is not unique to Dartmouth, by the way. It happens across the Ivy League. Athletes are rejected by one school only to wind up on the roster of another school. Ivy admissions has been labeled “highly selective.” It might be more accurate to call it “highly subjective,” especially in athletic recruiting. I just heard about a Yale lacrosse recruit who was flown in to New Haven and welcomed to the Eli lacrosse family—only to get a rejection letter in the mail two days later. It really makes you wonder what’s going on. How does this happen?</p>

<p>Is it true that at some schools, a student-athlete who fits in an AI “band” is all but guaranteed admissions by the numbers while at other schools (Dartmouth being one) a good deal more subjective criteria are taken into account and student-athletes who qualify numerically are regularly turned down?</p>

<p>That’s a complaint you hear from Dartmouth coaches, especially about schools lower on the Ivy totem pole, such as Brown, Cornell or Penn. But I heard it from a Cornell coach, who was critical of other schools for taking kids based on their numbers, while she had to wait for her admission office to review a recruit’s entire folder. And I know of a case at Brown where a coach was told “don’t bother” to recruit a kid based on the A.I. numbers, and the player wound up as an all-Ivy performer at Dartmouth. In football, a few Ivy coaches admitted to me that they sometimes fill higher A.I. bands with players they know will never see playing time for them. But they have to fill the bands to meet their A.I. average, so they recruit these kids. More often than not, these players quit the team—what’s known as “attrition” in the Ivy athletic lexicon. The whole numeric system is deeply flawed. There should definitely be an A.I. floor, but placing kids in bands, or having a school average A.I. for athletes, is a mistake.</p>

<p>If you think about it, the whole A.I. is really a double-edged sword. It eliminates kids while at the same time having a numerical basis makes it hard for the admission office to reject recruits who meet the numbers. Coaches argue, “Hey, he meets the numbers. He’s within the criteria. I’m doing what you’ve asked, why won’t you let him in?” But you can have a smart kid who tests well, yet his transcript shows he’s basically lazy—B’s in non-AP courses. He’s got a decent GPA, very good boards, so his A.I. is strong, and the coach wants him. But admissions says, “Wait a minute. This guy’s underachieving in the classroom. And he did a cursory job filling out his application, his recommendations are average, so we don’t want him.” When that happens, it ****es off the coach because the recruit’s A.I. met the criteria. But the A.I. is not meant to serve as the ultimate measure, the application is. So the system, while based on a numerical formula, is hardly cut and dried. In fact, you could say it’s even more complicated because of the A.I. and the averaging that must take place to conform to League rules.</p>

<p>here is an article of calculating AI, I hope it helps.</p>

<p><a href=“http://home.comcast.net/~charles517/ivyai.html[/url]”>http://home.comcast.net/~charles517/ivyai.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;