The Academics Cabinet continued its examination of initial-eligibility standards and will focus more attention on the high school core course grade-point average as a relatively strong predictor of academic success at the collegiate level.

After an extensive review of data showing the success rate of student-athletes related to their high school academic profiles,  last June the cabinet developed a set of guiding principles for its work, including the goals of improving first-year success and minimizing adverse impacts, preserving institutional authority to make admissions decisions, consideration of various data sets and keeping any standard simple and nationally applicable.

Data suggest that the high school core-course GPA is a good predictor of college academic success when compared with other academic components. That information swayed the cabinet to focus its attention in that area. Changes could take several forms, but during its next meeting the cabinet will examine the impact of imposing a GPA floor or increasing the weight of the GPA versus test scores on the sliding scale.

Cabinet members are interested in what changes would do to the rate of “false negatives” (prospects who do not meet the standard but ultimately prove academically successful) and “false positives” (prospects who meet the standard but fail), as well as how changes in the weighting of GPA versus test scores would affect the predicted outcomes.

The cabinet also began to wrestle with other questions related to academic preparedness, including how to develop better standards for two-year transfer student-athletes. Members will consider whether any potential changes to the initial-eligibility standards should be tied to the receipt of financial aid or just to the opportunity to compete (for example, freshmen ineligibility for student-athletes who fail to meet a minimum GPA standard).

Many cabinet members liked the idea of preserving access to education at four-year institutions as provided under the current initial-eligibility standards. Those standards were designed to more precisely identify student-athletes who are likely to succeed academically while minimizing disparate impact on minority student-athletes. The group was charged to get feedback on the concepts from conference offices and various constituent groups.

In other business, the cabinet received an update on the progress of the Facilitating Learning and Achieving Graduation Program (FLAG), a voluntary system designed to assess the level of academic risk for incoming freshmen and continuing student-athletes, recommend services based on the risk factors and evaluate the overall effectiveness of an institution’s support services. Programming for the Web-based system is almost complete, and 25 institutions are expected to begin piloting the program this fall.

The program has received broad support from the cabinet, the Basketball Academic Enhancement Group, the Football Academic Working Group and the Division I Board of Directors.