During its meeting last week, the Division I Committee on Academics supported a modification to the Academic Progress Rate related to transfer students.
The recommendation specifically would change the criteria for the automatic transfer adjustment available when a student-athlete loses a retention point from transferring to a four-year school. The change comes as part of an ongoing review of the APR and would require approval by the Division I Board of Directors.
The APR is a team-based metric that awards points every term for student-athletes who remain academically eligible for competition and stay in school or graduate.
In recognition of the changing landscape in college sports and new data on the relationship between APR and graduation, the committee proposed that schools be permitted to automatically adjust their retention rates under the APR if a student-athlete who transfers to another four-year school is meeting NCAA progress-toward-degree requirements.
Currently, schools can apply an automatic adjustment only for student-athletes who transfer to a four-year school with a 2.6 grade-point average. The other criteria of this adjustment will not change.
The committee will continue to monitor the impact of APR on limited-resource schools and historically Black colleges and universities, as well as any impact the changes to the APR calculation have on the correlation to Graduation Success Rate.
The modification to the requirement was recommended by a task force of committee members, which met separately to review the APR.
The task force review took place during the ongoing two-year suspension of both APR penalties and public release of data. The pause was approved by the Division I Board of Directors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The committee also continued discussions around initial eligibility requirements, specifically the NCAA requirements for standardized testing. Last fall, the NCAA extended a waiver that exempted incoming college freshmen from being required to submit standardized test scores because of the pandemic.
