PoliBlog ™: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts

The NYT has a lengthy, depressing and yet (unfortunately) not especially surprising tale of grades and athletes from Auburn University: Top Grades and No Class Time for Auburn Players. The surprising part has nothing to do with Auburn, per se, but with the whole “student athlete” situation in general.

The basics of the story have to do with football player taking guided readings courses with a specific member of the sociology faculty and receiving high grades, to the point that it helped the overall academic ranking of the football program.

Specifically, the interim chair [!] of the Sociology Department was offering a remarkable number of directed readings:

The number of directed readings that Professor Petee offered had jumped to 152 in the spring of 2005, from 120 in the fall of 2004. Professor Gundlach described them as fake courses and said they were undermining the department’s integrity.

Professor Petee offered 15 different courses as directed readings both semesters, along with teaching regular courses. His full-time-equivalent number on his teaching schedule for the fall of 2004 was 3.5, or the workload of three and a half professors. In the spring, it rose to 3.67. He was not compensated for the extra work.

The numbers included his in-classroom teachings and directed readings, but they did not include the time commitment for his responsibilities as interim department chairman.

[…]

After the confrontation, Professor Petee’s directed readings dipped to 25 last fall from 152. His full-time-equivalent number dropped to 1.0 from 3.67.

That is an insane amount of students and it is difficult to imagine that they were being adequately managed or instructed.

Further, the pattern of grading is suspicious as well:

Also after the confrontation in the faculty meeting, Professor Petee’s grades for the football players dropped sharply. Professor Gundlach found that before the meeting, the players received 81.1 percent A’s and 16.8 percent B’s in directed-reading courses with Professor Petee. After the meeting, those numbers fell to 40.9 percent A’s and 51.7 percent B’s.

And even with the shift, that is a highly unusual mix of combined percentage of As and Bs–certainly not one wold consider normal.

And then there is this example of the academic rigor in question:

In the fall of 2004, Mr. Langenfeld found himself in an academic bind. More than two months into the fall semester, he realized he had been attending the wrong class because of a scheduling error.

[…]

Mr. Langenfeld then went to his academic counselor in the athletic department, Brett Wohlers, with a plea: “I got dropped from a class and need a class to stay eligible for the bowl game,” Mr. Langenfeld recalled in a recent telephone interview. “I need a class, and I’ll take any class right now. I don’t not want to play in my last bowl game.”

He said Mr. Wohlers told him about a “one-assignment class” that other players had taken and enjoyed. So in the “ninth or 10th week,” Mr. Langenfeld said, he picked up a directed-reading course with Professor Petee. Semesters typically run 15 weeks.

Mr. Langenfeld said he had to read one book, but he could not recall the title. He said he was required to hand in a 10-page paper on the book. Between picking up the class and handing in the paper, he said, he met several times with Professor Petee in his office.

Such a tale is hardly the academy at its finest.

One sometimes wonders why schools don’t just design majors in football and be done with it.

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