Minimum Academic Standards Research Articles

Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Law School Financial Aid

Many law schools in the United States condition financial aid grants on the recipients’ maintenance of a certain grade point average. These merit stipulations require students to meet or exceed minimum academic standards in order to keep all or part of their financial aid. Law students should take merit stipulations into account when they decide whether to accept an offer of admission paired with a conditional grant of financial aid. By all accounts, they do not. Law schools should transparently disclose the likely effect of merit stipulations on their financial aid awards. By all accounts, law schools do no such thing. Absent external coercion, they are unlikely to change their current practices. In the absence of industry-wide standards counseling full disclosure of financial aid practices, this article will try to equip law school applicants with the mathematical tools to assess the real impact of merit stipulations on their financial well being.This article first presents very simple models for discounting financial aid awards for the risk of failure to uphold a merit stipulation. It outlines a simple methodology for calculating the expected value of a financial aid award subject to a merit stipulation. The article also evaluates one extraordinary circumstance in which a law school has implicitly revealed its break-even point - the amount of aid that the school would award if it did not impose any merit stipulations.Building upon those foundations, this article performs a comprehensive analysis of law school grades and merit stipulations as artifacts of the standard normal distribution. It performs three distinct tasks. This article defines standard scores and explains how law school grading is based on the relationship between the standard score of each student’s raw score and the mean and standard deviation of of the distribution as a whole. This article then describes the risk of failure to satisfy a merit stipulation in terms of the normal distribution’s cumulative distribution function. For those instances in which the risk of failure to satisfy a particular school’s merit stipulation is known, this article demonstrates how to use the inverse cumulative distribution function to estimate the mean and standard deviation of a school’s grade distribution. As a bonus, this final exercise provides an introduction to value-at-risk analysis, a leading tool for assessing risk in global capital markets.

A Brave New World: Australian Learning Outcomes in Accounting Education

During 2010, minimum academic standards for Australian bachelor and master degree programmes in accounting were formulated. These were developed for a new higher education system predicated on expansion, including participation targets and demand-driven funding for public institutions, and a centralised regulatory and quality assurance system to support consumer protection covering all providers. In 2011 a pilot project involving 25% of Australian universities that provide accounting education, is underway to assess achievement of graduating student outcomes against nationally agreed academic standards. The benchmarking process involves double-blind external peer review. It will be expanded in 2012 to embrace other universities and non-university providers including emerging providers from both the private sector and the vocational education sector.

Academic Progress Reports: Leadership Implications for College Basketball Coaches

The Academic Progress Report, commonly referred to as APR, is an evaluation tool established by the NCAA to monitor current academic progress for Division I intercollegiate student-athletes in regard to eligibility, retention, and graduation. APR data collection was initially started with the 2003-04 academic year. The first data report was released in February 2005 for all Division I member institutions. The Academic Progress Report was born out of a need to better calculate graduation rates and is a continuous assessment tool for the NCAA. Under this new system, the APR awards two points each term to student-athletes who meet all minimum academic eligibility standards and who remain at that Division I institution. The Division I Board of Directors approved 925 as the minimum cut off score for all teams. The 925 score out of a possible 1,000 translates to approximately sixty percent on the new Graduation Success Rate (GSR). The GSR is an alternate graduation rate system that was also recently launched by the NCAA. While the existing graduation rate calculation system is still in place, the new GSR accounts for outgoing transfer or incoming transfer student-athletes which the current graduation rate calculation does not. The existing graduation rate system also does not monitor student-athlete eligibility.

Labour market expectation of Nigerian computer science / Information Communication Technology (ICT) graduates

The National Universities Commission (NUC) is the regulating agency of Nigerian Universities. It is empowered among other things to establish Minimum Academic Standards (MAS) for Nigerian Universities as well as to accredit their degrees. In 1989, the commission produced the MAS for all undergraduate programmes in Nigerian Universities. In order to meet labour market expectation, the World Bank in 2000AD commissioned a study on “Labour Market prospects of University Graduates in Nigeria”. The objective of the study is to assess the effect of Nigerian Universities' curricula on the performance of Computer Science graduates. This paper looks into the strength and weaknesses of Computer Science graduates in Nigeria with a view to assess if they meet the labour market expectation. It also x-rays the women performance in Computer Science. Finally, the paper proposes method of bridging the gap between the achieved and intended curriculum in Computer Science. One hundred and fifty (150) questionnaires were distributed to supervisors and key players who worked directly with the Computer Science/ICT graduates and were in position to know their strength, deficiencies/weaknesses and skill gap. One hundred and eight (108) questionnaires were duly filled and returned. The opinion of these supervisors and key players were analyzed using variables such as competence, creativity, innovation, rational judgement, leadership and learning ability. From the study, it may be inferred that employers rate computer science graduates above average in overall performance showing adequate theoretical curriculum. Some major weaknesses were reported in their technical, practical skills and entrepreneurial skills. However, if the curriculum can address the major weaknesses especially practical and technical skills, Nigerian Computer Science students will easily compete globally.keywords: national universities commission, minimum academic standards, labour market expectation The Information Technologist Vol. 3(1) 2006: 1-7

IMPROVING THE PASS RATES OF COMMUNITY-COLLEGE STUDENTS ON CERTIFICATION EXAMINATIONS

ABSTRACT Due to the implementation of a performance-based funding plan, community colleges in North Carolina must attain a minimum percentage of students successfully passing licensure and certification examinations. To meet this mandate, Catawba Valley Community College implemented a basic skills component, with minimum academic standards, to assist students in achieving success. This study found these measures significant in improving student pass rates on the EMT-Basic certification examination, despite nonsignificance related to student age or education levels.

Remedial Education and Student Achievement: A Regression-Discontinuity Analysis

As standards and accountability have become increasingly prominent features of the educational landscape, educators have relied more on remedial programs such as summer school and grade retention to help low-achieving students meet minimum academic standards. Yet the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs is mixed, and prior research suffers from selection bias. However, recent school reform efforts in Chicago provide an opportunity to examine the causal impact of these remedial education programs. In 1996, the Chicago Public Schools instituted an accountability policy that tied summer school and promotional decisions to performance on standardized tests, which resulted in a highly nonlinear relationship between current achievement and the probability of attending summer school or being retained. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the net effect of these programs was to substantially increase academic achievement among third-graders, but not sixth-graders. In addition, contrary ...

Are States Moving Toward Deregulation of Nutrition Professionals?

The single highest priority for the American Dietetic Association in the area of state government affairs has been, and continues to be, the attainment of statutory recognition for dietitians. This recognition, in the form of licensure or title protection, establishes the minimum academic and experiential standards to provide accurate and safe nutrition advice. The ultimate goal of statutory recognition is to protect the public by identifying individuals that have met those standards. Thus far, 43 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia have approved some form of recognition; however, many individuals and authorities are beginning to question the value of statutory recognition. Two issues in particular demand attention.

“Warn Students That I Entertain Heretical Opinions, Which They Are Not to Take as Law”: The Inception of Case Method Teaching in the Classrooms of the Early C. C. Langdell, 1870–1883

Christopher Columbus Langdell (1826–1906) was perhaps the most influential figure in the history of legal education in the United States. He shaped the modern law school by introducing a number of significant reforms during his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895. Indeed, Langdell may well be the most influential figure in the history of American professional education because he established at HLS, with the help of President Charles W. Eliot, the model for twentieth-century professional schools. His innovations—such as minimum academic standards for admission to degree candidacy, a graded and sequential curriculum, minimum academic standards for continuation in a degree program, a professorial career track for faculty members, and the transformation of the library from a textbook repository into a scholarly resource—became the norm to which leading law schools, medical schools, and, finally, schools of other professions in the twentieth century aspired. Among these changes, none is more closely associated with Langdell than the introduction of case method teaching.

Reversing the Imbalance of Athletics and Academics

This article criticizes the emphasis at all levels of schooling of sports over academics, particularly the shorter length of the U. S. school year in comparison to other countries. I advocate that adults emphasize academics by setting minimum academic standards as a prerequisite for athletic participation and that students carefully select a college on the basis of characteristics such as graduation rates rather than athletic achievement.

Minimum Academic Standards: Yes

Minimum Academic Standards: Yes

In Defense of Minority Admissions Programs: A Response to Professor Graglia

The most effective rebuttal of Professor Graglia's position opposing minority group admissions programs is a reading of his article. While assumedly written for the legal profession, the article eschews legal analysis for vague, unsupported suggestions that such programs may constitute reverse discrimination. 1 The article establishes a number of premises: that the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and undergraduate grades measure law school and professional potential with mathematical accuracy; that most law schools adopting minority admissions previously had selected students almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria; and that minority students unable to meet minimum academic standards are unqualified. None of these