The progress toward degree rule, commonly referred to as the 40-60-80 rule, is a piece of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) legislation designed to increase retention and graduation rates of NCAA Division I student athletes. The legislation, that took effect for first time freshmen in 2003, states that by the beginning of the student-athlete’s third year of college enrollment, they must have completed 40% of the classes required toward a specific degree. This rate of progress toward a specific degree must continue so that by the beginning of the student-athlete’s fourth year, they must have completed 60% and by the beginning of their fifth year, they must have completed 80% of their required coursework toward a specific degree. This legislation, part of many academically oriented rules the NCAA has put into place over the past 20 years, was written in response to several calls for reform of "big time" college athletics including, most notably, the Knight Commission.
Famous quotes containing the words progress and/or degree:
“All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You first have an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)