NCAA criteria for Division I play is ridiculously low. The NCAA has a sliding scale that combines your GPA with your SAT or ACT score to see if you are eligible to play as a student-athlete. If you are a typical HS school student with a B average or a GPA of 3.0, the SAT and ACT thresholds are 620 and 52, respectively. These scores seem to represent reasonable measures of academic knowledge and achievements since the lowest possible SAT score is 400/1600 and ACT sums can theoretically be as low as 4/144. In actuality these scores mean nothing and merely represent a second route for extremely ill-prepared students to qualify as college student-athletes.
The NCAA ACT score is the sum of all four sections (English, Reading, Math and Science) which means you can meet the threshold by studying just one subject really well or by getting 13 on each of 4 sections. How hard is it to achieve 13 on each section? For the math section this means that you need to get 10-11 questions correct out of 60. Since the ACT does not penalize for wrong answers and each multiple choice question has 5 choices, you can random guess the entire section and have a better than 50% chance of passing. Similarly for the Science section where an ACT score of 13 requires getting 10 questions correct out of 40, random guessing will also work since each question only has four choices. Random guessing will also work for the other sections.
The new SAT also does not penalize for wrong answers so random guessing 45 multiple choice math questions with 4 choices will on average net you 11 correct answers which correspond to a scaled score of 360. Random guessing the reading and writing sections of the new SAT will also yield a scaled score of 360. This means a student will zero academic preparedness or knowledge and zero effort (except for spending 5 minutes to bubble all As or Cs, etc. on a test) can score 720 on the SAT and be eligible to play for Division I Colleges. In fact a 720 on the SAT means that a student with a mediocre GPA of 2.75 or B- can play college sports. Put another way, if you are a C student the NCAA sliding scale represents a second route to eligibility by allowing a borderline student a chance to demonstrate some academic achievement by scoring 1010 on the SAT or 66 on the ACT. Can we really say these are student-athletes?
