Duke and Georgetown basketball recruiting...

[calltheobvious]

Throaty, I appreciate that insight, but if I'm a high school senior whose profile leaves me on the cusp of admission to Duke, I'm far more concerned with standards being relaxed slightly for many students in exchange for donations to the annual fund than I am with standards being lowered dramatically for only a few students in exchange for donations to the athletics department. Furthermore, this hypothetical student is not competing for admission with Sean Dockery. The decisions of K and the admissions committee on cases like Sean's (God, I hate reducing to a file folder or a statistic someone I admire so much) have no bearing whatsoever on the average Duke applicant.

[Jumbo]

i'm catching up on old bd weeklys and in the march 10th one there is an article on the campus culture initiative steering committee. it cites the committee as calling for "the admissions office to reduce the number of athletes admitted near the low end of Duke's academic standards." usually brodhead gets it wrong with athletics but he is spot on there.

It's funny, I could have sworn you were arguing against me on the lacrosse board a couple of months ago, when I cited a study saying that athletes get the most preferential treatment of any sub-group in college admissions. You seem to be doing a 180 in this thread.

[johnb]

1. Dock's race was not a significant factor. His being the all-time career leader in both steals and assists in the great state of Illinois was a factor, as was the fact that careful evaluation of him as a person showed that he was durable and earnest and would do fine at Duke in spite of the high demands of his sport. If he had applied as a nonathlete, I doubt if he would have been considered. I think it's important to realize that he didn't take up a spot that would have gone to Johnny Jones from Durham Academy. He took a spot that would have gone to Anthony Roberson or some other 1st team high school all american. Sean and Johnny would never have been mentioned in the same sentence by an admissions officer.

2. I don't think Dock's grades and SAT's are public, and so the Chronicle "journalist" made them up or got them from an unreliable source. If either is true, she should be canned from writing editorials. She may have good SAT's, but that doesn't mean she is ethical or wise. Reminds me of the time that Dean Smith revealed that the combined SAT's of Laettner and Ferry were less than those of Scott Williams and another black Carolina player; while a nice anti-racist factoid, it breaks the rules in that such numbers are supposed to be private.

3. Admissions is not a reward for good grades and SAT's. It is a process that helps bring together an interesting bunch of people. Anyone who thinks it is an exact science--or a legitimate arbiter of worth--has not been on an admissions committee.

4. By having a bunch of relatively nonacademic kids on campus, the "academic" kids get higher grades, which comes in handy when they apply to Yale's graduate program in English. The relatively nonscholarly kids tend to go to Wall Street and quickly make 5 times the salary of an assistant professor. Seems to me that it works out okay for everyone except the earnest, hardworking kid with a 3.8 and a 1490 who gets turned down (and has to go to a school that is roughly as good as Duke, where s/he will do just fine).

5. By the way, a recent Princeton study concluded that legacies do worse than minority students who have the same grades/SAT's (see this week's Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i31/31a02801.htm

[Jumbo]

2. I don't think Dock's grades and SAT's are public, and so the Chronicle "journalist" made them up or got them from an unreliable source. If either is true, she should be canned from writing editorials. She may have good SAT's, but that doesn't mean she is ethical or wise.

If SAT information isn't public, that means Duke, Dockery's high school and the SAT board can't release the information. So, if someone released that information to a reporter, that's who should be "canned," if you're looking to blame someone. The Chronicle is under no such obligation to protect SAT scores, and if newspapers didn't print otherwise privileged information leaked from official sources, well, you can imagine where this country might be today.

[dukie8]

It's funny, I could have sworn you were arguing against me on the lacrosse board a couple of months ago, when I cited a study saying that athletes get the most preferential treatment of any sub-group in college admissions. You seem to be doing a 180 in this thread.

i can't recall exactly what we were arguing about but i never would have claimed that the basketball players get less preferential than other groups. athletes across the board get preferential treatment, which is fine and necessary if you want to have competitive teams. however, what i have a big problem with is when duke throws all standards out the window to admit someone because he can play basketball.

on a related note, i do wonder what the price is to buy your way into duke. let's say that bill gates has a kid with a 2.3 gpa and 15 act, what's the price he would have to pay to get the kid in? $10MM? $50MM? $100MM? there's a price for everything.

[dukie8]

2. I don't think Dock's grades and SAT's are public, and so the Chronicle "journalist" made them up or got them from an unreliable source. If either is true, she should be canned from writing editorials. She may have good SAT's, but that doesn't mean she is ethical or wise. Reminds me of the time that Dean Smith revealed that the combined SAT's of Laettner and Ferry were less than those of Scott Williams and another black Carolina player; while a nice anti-racist factoid, it breaks the rules in that such numbers are supposed to be private.

as jumbo pointed out, this is entirely incorrect. the journalist could have received the sats from an extremely reliable source and just printed them. ethical? not really, but she had no duty not to disclose them.

[Scarbo]

"as jumbo pointed out, this is entirely incorrect. the journalist could have received the sats from an extremely reliable source and just printed them. ethical? not really, but she had no duty not to disclose them...."

Or she simply could've done 5 seconds of research to find out those scores aren't possible, per the NCAA's own sliding scale. A kid w/ a 2.5 gpa must post a minimum score of 17 on the act. Journalist, eh? Lazy, hateful cow is probably more apt...

[johnb]

as jumbo pointed out, this is entirely incorrect. the journalist could have received the sats from an extremely reliable source and just printed them. ethical? not really, but she had no duty not to disclose them.

I love it when two very opinionated guys are wrong (even though I also enjoy your posts, and I am indeed often entirely incorrect).

The scores that she quoted would not have gotten him past the NCAA standards, much less Duke's. Further, what would be the reliable source? Think she called Dock or the athletics department at either Duke or one of the schools to which Dock applied? I think she either made up his grades or got them 3rd/4th hand in order to make her uninspired point. In either of those cases, what she did seems unethical to me (I didn't say immoral--it's competing goods not good vs. bad, but in regards to the competing goods of privacy and disclosure, I think we should be clear that we're not talking about Watergate; we're talking about the high school grades of someone who has already graduated from the college where his high school numbers are arguably the reason he shouldn't have been admitted in the first place). In this instance, I think a journalist has a duty not to disclose private information. And when she prints information that is wrong, she and her editors should be ashamed of themselves.

Look, I also take pause with admissions policies that lead a whole subset of the Duke population to have different academic backgrounds than the rest of the campus, but I also question whether that implies unusual "preferential treatment." The whole campus is filled with people who got preferential treatment (geography, alums, faculty kids, special talents, bright smiles, etc). These latter people are unlikely to have an SAT under 1100, but there are plenty of people who get rejected from Duke whose numbers are higher than theirs. And if you are looking simply at on-campus success and general merit, our basketball players graduate at high rates and have an ancillary skill that is far more rare than that which goes into the selection of the AB Duke scholars.

By the way, has any Duke professor ever publicly complained about either the basketball or fooball players? My understanding is that some professors loathed some lacrosse players because a subset acted like anti-intellectual spoiled jerks whereas the professors appreciated the effort that the major sports guys put into their studies and the fact that they seemed to be taking advantage of an opportunity that they deeply appreciated.

The admissions department does NOT toss standards out the window in regards to athletes. Prospective admits are evaluated with MUCH MORE care than is the average applicant. This is partly for the good of a marginally academic prospect, but it is also because each of these top prospects is worth his weight in gold to the team; an academic failure can cost the team a chance at the final four.

As for the theoretical Gates kid: if s/he grows up with two genius parents with all the attention and schooling that money can buy and still has a 2.3 and under 1000 SAT's, this is a kid who is fundamentally different than the average Duke basketball player, who tends to be extremely hard working and is willing to attend a school where his classmates will admire his talents and--judging from some of the posts on this thread--disparage his right to be a classmate.

Anyway, my central point is that if people want to complain about admissions, perhaps they could avoid dissing specific players (for all we know, for example, Mr. Patterson reads this stuff and--while I have no idea about his grades and SAT's--he just may prefer to go to a school where students can admire thoroughbreds without spending time on their high horses)

[bill brill]

I know something about dockery's situation. the numbers that have been reported apparently were published in chicago after his junior year. he had a superb senior year and raised both his gpa and his act. I have an idea what the latter was but I can't be sure, so won't print it. and K told me that summer, everybody runs his own race, and dock's was different from most. he met with all of the people necessary when he visited. he was extremely academically oriented. he did well in school. he graduated. if you ever talked to him, you'd know why. and, oh yeah, he was the only person from his high school to go to college.

[dukie8]

I know something about dockery's situation. the numbers that have been reported apparently were published in chicago after his junior year. he had a superb senior year and raised both his gpa and his act. I have an idea what the latter was but I can't be sure, so won't print it. and K told me that summer, everybody runs his own race, and dock's was different from most. he met with all of the people necessary when he visited. he was extremely academically oriented. he did well in school. he graduated. if you ever talked to him, you'd know why. and, oh yeah, he was the only person from his high school to go to college.

bill, thanks for clearing it up. so dockery wasn't actually a 2.3/15 guy and had much better numbers when he started duke. my guess is that k told him that summer that if he wanted to come to duke, he need to buckle down in the classroom, he did and that's the end of the story.

[greybeard]

WOW. That's quite the leap. Were you on the track team in high school?

Feldspar, I fear that you never actually played the game, mcuh less really understand it. The game is all about geometry, physics, deductive reasoning, and that is without the complexities that modern defenses and offenses present. You only have to listen to some of the better spoken players who never got much education but who totally "got" the game to understand the depth of intellectual capacity that goes into such mastery.

Why in heaven's name should a person who has a wonderful feel for the geometry, physics, etc that goes into sports and has developed that understanding into a computer-like useability be put on a dramaticly lesser footing than some other person who has demonstrated his or her understanding of such things in the more conventional arena of competition in which we place learning known as a classroom?

Participating in the physical word and learning through movement is, after all, where all learning begins. On the other hand, everyone associated with them understands that SAT tests require special tricks in order to do well even for the very best and brightest, by what I take would be your conventional measure, who almost uniformly spend a thousand bucks on special courses so they can do well on them.

If you examine the nature of learning from an epistemolic perspective, you will find a considerable school of serious thought to support the perspective that I have put forth. You will do that if you care to expand your myopic view of the value of sport and those who play it, or not. I am far from a dim wit, have learned the great game from some of the very best and from years of participation, and have spent years examing on a serious level the intersticies between action and thought, and how each might influence the other. Or, we can meet somewhere, and just play a game of horse or one on one to decide who shuts up. I am 60 years old but can assure you it won't be me.

[greybeard]

Coincidences ever abound. I was watching TV this evening, and I think it was CNN Sports did a piece on a physicist who was a 1000 point scorer in high school and college and who wrote a book called "Basketball and Physics" or some such. Anyway, he says that having an understanding of the natural laws immeasurably improve one's ability to play the game. He did not say that if you can really play the game, it follows that you must on a fundamental level grasp the natural laws articulated by Sir Isaac. He didn't say it; but I have and do.

I'm definitely buying that book, btw; think it will make working with kids on the great game ever more effective and interesting from many perspectives.

[EasternDB]

My oldest son (7th Grade) played soccer in the fall and now plays baseball for his middle school team. Everyday after school they have a two hour practice and twice a week (Mon. & Wed.) they have a game. On away games, it could be 9:00 pm getting home. He still has the same amount of homework & school projects as non-athletes. There has been several nites where he has been doing homework @ 11:00 pm, only to have to get up at 6:00 am to start all over again. Baseball season last for 3 months.

He is also an honors student and was able to take the SAT this past January because of being involved in the Duke TIP Program.

My point is Student Athletics takes a huge amount of time. The students must learn very early how to manage their time. An Student Athlete who has an 1000 SAT score would not worry me a bit.

JMO...