Not so fast on Mary Willingham's alleged study about illiterate college athletes...

[alp227]

Lately, claims by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Mary Willingham about the low literacy of college athletes have been hyped. But slow down for a moment. Now her "research" has been called into question. As true as stories like the UNC football player who plagiarized a kids' website for his communications class and the no-show classes are, it seems that Willingham is sensationalizing her own data and is being enabled by the unquestioning media.

Take this CNN article written by Sara Ganim, who won a Pulitzer in 2012 for her exposes of Jerry Sandusky for the Harrisburg Patriot-News. Ganim wrote on Jan. 7 about Willingham:

As a graduate student at UNC-Greensboro, Willingham researched the reading levels of 183 UNC-Chapel Hill athletes who played football or basketball from 2004 to 2012. She found that 60% read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Between 8% and 10% read below a third-grade level.

The problem with this passage? Willingham earned her master's degree from UNCG in 2009. And the UNCG library has her thesis online for free. Nothing in the thesis suggests any of the stats CNN reported. Furthermore, Willingham already shared much of the core of her thesis in a November 2012 report by the Raleigh News & Observer. In other words, what Ganim reported for CNN w.r.t. UNC is OLD NEWS.

On Friday, UNCCH issued findings that call Willingham's methodology in question. Outlets reporting on the Friday meeting include CNN and the Raleigh News & Observer. As the N&O reported:

At a faculty meeting, Provost Jim Dean showed slides and test samples to call into question the conclusions of Mary Willingham, the university employee whose claims made national news on CNN last week. Her study on athletes has been suspended by UNC-CH’s Institutional Review Board because of rules that protect the identities of human subjects in research, the university said.

In an hourlong discussion at UNC-CH’s Faculty Council, Dean – along with Chancellor Carol Folt and the head of admissions, Steve Farmer – went through powerpoints to bolster their argument that the CNN report, and Willingham’s allegations, are flawed. The packed meeting capped more than a week of explosive headlines and TV reports that suggested some UNC-CH athletes were ill-prepared for college work and doomed to failure.

“Using this data set to say that our students can’t read is a travesty and unworthy of this university,” Dean said. “These claims have been unfair to the students, unfair to the admissions officers, unfair to the university.”

The test Willingham used to diagnose reading skill, called the Scholastic Abilities Test for Adults, was a 10-minute reading vocabulary test that is not recommended alone to judge overall literacy, Dean said. And, he added, Willingham apparently misinterpreted the results of the data by presenting standard scores as grade equivalents, rendering her conclusions “virtually meaningless.”

He showed a blank exam as an example. Each question had four words and the test-taker has to decide whether some of the words are synonyms, antonyms or unrelated. There were no reading comprehension passages.

And the Daily Tar Heel reports:

On Thursday, Willingham received a letter from the UNC Office of Human Research Ethics saying that the data she had taken to CNN was no longer approved by the University’s Institutional Research Board, an infringement on both federal and UNC policies if she continues to use the research without approval.

The IRB, which includes various faculty members that review the University’s research on human subjects, reports to Dean.

The letter states that her data, which screened Attention Deficit Disorder and learning disorders in student-athletes, identified its participants. This violates the terms of research approval set by the board in 2008 and when the research was re-approved in 2013, according to the letter.

There's no denying the general sense of academic fraud surrounding big-name college sports, especially the popular cases like at the University of Georgia in the '80s, Binghamton University 2009, Auburn 2006, and Minnesota 1999.

Unfortunately, this Mary Willingham story poisons the well. It seems that Willingham has a dishonest axe to grind, and she is being enabled by a naive news media. Some may say UNC-CH is playing CYA, but think again if you consider the flaws in MW's research and her possible dishonesty with her university's review board.

[tammywammy]

1. Interesting.

I've found if it sounds sensationalized, it probably is.

[Stallion]

2. NCAA Schools Should Be Required to Produce Standardized Profile of Athletes

This information should be public information. Unfortunately as someone who closely follows NCAA admission standards, the sources of information and the CNN report didn't really focus on the correct standards and many of schools that did respond to the FOI requests were less than forthcoming.

On the other hand, there are significant changes coming that should bring needed changes and an improvement in student preparation for College. For example, JUCO players starting this year now need a 2.5 GPA a substantial increase from the old 2.0 GPA requirement. Also, they will now have much more stringent core requirements.

Also, starting in 2016 freshman will be subject to a mandatory academic redshirt if they don't meet some significant new requirements-its hard to explain because its a sliding scale calculating GPA and SAT/ACT scores. Suffice it to say that NCAA studies have shown (from memory) that approximately 38% of football recruits and something like 42% of Basketball recruits wouldn't have been eligible to play (based on based performance) as freshmen unless they improve their college preparedness.

There really have been significant improvement lead by university Presidents over the last 30 years ago in admission standards. I think they got it right starting in 2016