George Washington University

May 6, 2008

INDIANAPOLIS, IN - The George Washington University women's rowing, women's volleyball and men's soccer programs each received Public Recognition Awards for Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores, the NCAA announced. It marks the second straight year the Colonials' volleyball team has earned the award.

The award recognizes multi-year APR scores in the top 10 percent of all squads in their respective sport. GW's women's rowing had a perfect score of 1,000, followed by a 995 for women's volleyball and 988 for men's soccer.

The three GW programs are among the 712 Division I sports teams honored with the NCAA Public Recognition Award. The public recognition awards are part of the broad Division I academic reform effort.

The APR provides a real-time look at a team's academic success each semester by tracking the academic progress of each student-athlete. The APR includes eligibility, retention, and graduation in the calculation and provides a clear picture of the academic culture in each sport. High-performing teams receiving awards posted APR scores ranging from 965 to a perfect 1,000.

Established by the NCAA to measure the success or failure of collegiate athletic teams in moving student-athletes toward graduation, the APR was instituted in February of 2005. Collegiate sports teams failing to achieve an APR score of 925 - equivalent to a 50% graduation rate - may be penalized with the loss of scholarships. The APR is designed to measure semester-by-semester academic progress, and is separate from the Graduation Success Rate (GSR), which only aims to measure the actual percentage of student-athletes who graduate, thus omitting students who would have graduated but left school early for non-academic reasons (such as a professional career).

According to the NCAA, the APR is calculated by allocating points for eligibility and retention -- the two factors that research identifies as the best indicators of graduation. Each player on a given roster earns a maximum of two points per term, one for being academically eligible and one for staying with the institution. A team's APR is the total points of a team's roster at a given time divided by the total points possible.