{"id":3260,"date":"2008-12-30T10:28:24","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T10:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/30\/sports-test-scores-and-the-dif\/"},"modified":"2008-12-30T10:28:24","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T10:28:24","slug":"sports-test-scores-and-the-dif","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/30\/sports-test-scores-and-the-dif\/","title":{"rendered":"Sports, Test Scores, and the Difference Between Science and Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><cite>Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> has an <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\/news\/2008\/12\/29\/admit\">article on athletics and admissions<\/a> based on an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ajc.com\/sports\/content\/sports\/stories\/\/2008\/12\/28\/acadmain_1228_3DOT.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab\">investigative report<\/a> from the <cite>Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/cite>. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and journalism.<\/p>\n<p>The basis of the report is pretty simple: the paper got the test score reports for 55 major colleges and universities, from data that they are required to file with the NCAA. They compared the average scores for football and basketball players to the scores of other athletes and students in general, and found all sorts of splashy results:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>All 53 schools for which football SAT scores were available had at least an 88-point gap between team members&#8217; average score and the average for the student body.<\/li>\n<li>Schools with the highest admissions standards, such as Georgia Tech; the University of Virginia; the University of California, Berkeley; UCLA; and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had the biggest gaps between the SAT averages for athletes and the overall student body.<\/li>\n<li>Football players performed 115 points worse on the SAT than male athletes in other sports.<\/li>\n<li>The differences between athletes&#8217; and non-athletes&#8217; SAT scores was less than half as big for women (73 points) as for men (170).<\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course, there&#8217;s a screamingly obvious objection to their method. I&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/10\/race_class_and_graduation_rate.php\">blogged about it before<\/a>, and it&#8217;s even raised in the AJC story, by Georgia Tech basketball coach Paul Hewitt:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>But Georgia Tech men&#8217;s basketball coach Paul Hewitt says he and other coaches are able to go beyond test scores to find recruits who can succeed in school while also having the talent to play at a high level.<\/p>\n<p>Hewitt says the only fair comparison is between athletes and other students with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Seen that way, he argues, athletics programs perform very well. Black athletes, for example, graduate at higher rates than black students as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;To insinuate that athletics has caused this problem of poor graduation rates [among black students] is wrong,&#8221; Hewitt said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And here is where we see the difference between science&#8211; even social science&#8211; and journalism. A scientist would anticipate this objection, and attempt to address it in the report. For example, you could try to find some data on the socioeconomic backgrounds of the athletes, and attempt to control for those effects by comparing the athletes&#8217; scores to their demographic peers, to see if the gap remained, or narrowed, or even expanded.<\/p>\n<p>A journalist just reports the objection in a half-dozen sentences buried in the middle of the story, and considers his job complete.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the difference between somebody who is attempting to learn something useful about a situation, and somebody who is just trying to sell newspapers.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong, here&#8211; I&#8217;m not just saying this because I&#8217;m a college basketball fan, and think this will make college hoops players look better. It probably would narrow the gap, but it&#8217;s not hard to imagine plausible ways it could make things look worse, if you did a good job of controlling for both race and class. African-American basketball players from poor economic backgrounds at a place like Georgia Tech might well find themselves being compared to students who are <strong>better<\/strong> than average. I imagine there aren&#8217;t a whole lot of poor African-American students waltzing into Georgia Tech on family connections or to drum up donations, so it&#8217;s conceivable that other students from backgrounds similar to some of the basketball team might need to be really strong to end up there in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s the thing&#8211; we don&#8217;t know, because nobody&#8217;s got the data. And given that the story doesn&#8217;t even offer a token excuse about how that information isn&#8217;t available, it doesn&#8217;t seem like they&#8217;re in a hurry to get it. Without that comparison, though, this whole story is worthless.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, if they had done the actual work&#8211; or even the trivial amount of work required to check out Hewitt&#8217;s claim about graduation rates (see <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/10\/race_class_and_graduation_rate.php\">my old post<\/a>)&#8211; they might need to address the way that low-income and minority students systematically underperform. Which might lead people to wonder what that says about the job we do educating children from poor and urban communities in this country.<\/p>\n<p>And, God knows, we can&#8217;t have that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inside Higher Ed has an article on athletics and admissions based on an investigative report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and journalism. The basis of the report is pretty simple:&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/30\/sports-test-scores-and-the-dif\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sports, Test Scores, and the Difference Between Science and Journalism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,28,75,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-class_issues","category-politics","category-society","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}