UNC has been careful about how and on what it comments in the new Carol Folt administration, which is less than a year old. UNC Director of Undergraduate Admissions, Steve Farmer made sure not to lay blame on academic adviser Mary Willingham after a review by three outside experts found that her claims of illiteracy among UNC student-athletes were not supported by the data she was using in the research.
“I really don’t think the data today are about any one person,” Farmer says. “I think the reports that we released today are the facts about the stories that came out back in January. Our focus is on our students and on trying to do right by them, and our focus is on trying to get better day-by-day.”
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Willingham was quoted in a story on CNN saying that SATA RV (Scholastic Abilities Test for Adults Reading Vocabulary) subtests of 183 student-athletes found 60 percent of them read between fourth- and eight-grade levels.
The number of student athletes with test results was corrected to 176 with six entries not having results. The first number was misreported as 183 when it should have been 182.
Farmer says the release of this data is a step in the direction of putting the negativity of this story behind them and continuing to work on making the institute as beneficial for all students as possible.
“We believe the students who are here are fully capable of doing the work that we ask them to do,” Farmer says. “The next step for us, I think, is to continue to do what we’ve been doing now for many months, which is to work hard and work patiently and deliberately to try to make sure that we support and encourage every student here at Chapel Hill.”
For more about the report released by UNC, click here.
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