Do You Want The Money That These Brutes Bring In or Not?

Why not give a C if the professor is bullied by the Athletic Department of the University?

Check out the terrible paper that earned a player an A- at North Carolina

By Jay BusbeeMarch 27, 2014 11:10 AMThe Dagger

.

View photo

UNC athlete paper.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of our nation's finest universities, ranking 30th in the latest U.S. News and World Report list of top schools and eighth on Forbes' list of top public colleges. And the bit of drivel above apparently earned an A-minus, according to ESPN.

Why? Simple. That paper was written by an athlete for a class specifically designed to keep them moving through the university.

"Athletes couldn't write a paper," Mary Willingham, a specialist in the school's learning-support system-turned-whistleblower, told ESPN. "They couldn't write a paragraph. They couldn't write a sentence yet." She said that some of the students were reading at a second- or third-grade level, which is considered illiterate for a college-age student. As Willingham notes, in the "AFAM" classes, players were notching As and Bs, but in actual classes such as Biology and Economics were receiving Ds and Fs.

The academic scandal at UNC has deep roots; hundreds of classes since the mid-1990s fell into a "no-show" category, classes made up primarily or completely of athletes who didn't even show up to class and yet earned an A. Such dry statistics generally receive a disbelieving shake of the head, but it's not until you actually see what kind of work these "students" were producing that you start to see the way a "student-athlete," and an athletic department, can game the system:

That paper doesn't even make it six words before its first error (the actual date of Rosa Parks' bus incident was Dec. 1, 1955), and the rest of the paper would make a fourth-grade Language Arts teacher burn through two red pens.

One of the key arguments of the NCAA and its defenders, or those opposed to paying players, is that the players are "receiving a valuable education." Giving an A-minus to a paper like this shows how false that premise can be.

____

Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter.