The NCAA on Tuesday released its annual report on Academic Progress Rates, or APR, which measure college athletes' annual academic performance. The NCAA says that APR "holds institutions accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes through a team-based metric that accounts for the eligibility and retention of each student-athlete for each academic term."
According to NCAA data, Michigan, which won Big Ten and national championships last year, recorded a perfect one-year APR score of 1,000 for the 2022-23 academic calendar, the most recent reporting year. Ohio State and Minnesota also reported one-year scores of 1,000.
Penn State football improved its year-over-year academic progress after coach James Franklin said the program would address its performance last year. Penn State recorded an Academic Progress rate of 959 for the 2022-23 academic year, an improvement over the score of 914 it recorded in 2021-22.
Following last year's reported score, Franklin said that Penn State would "get it right."
"I think first of all everybody knows how important academics are to Penn State, the university as a whole," Franklin said in 2023. "When I'm saying that, I'm talking about obviously in the athletic department, then with our football program, both present day and from a historical perspective.
Something that we take tremendous pride in and is very, very serious to us.
"We've historically been really good in that. I think the year before COVID we had a perfect thousand APR. It's something that we take a lot of pride in. Obviously we're going to spend a lot of energy and resources on getting it back where we want it to be. [Athletic Director] Pat [Kraft] is aligned on that. I'm aligned on that. So is our staff. We take a lot of pride in it, and we'll get it right. I think the last thing I'd say, though, is ultimately if you look at our graduation rates, our graduation rates have really been good, the actual graduation rates, not the predictor of graduation."
Penn State's 2021-22 APR score of 914 was the program's lowest in a decade and the lowest in the Big Ten Conference for the academic year. The 2022-23 APR score of 959 ranked 12th in the Big Ten last season. Penn State football posted a perfect APR of 1,000 for the 2018-19 academic year.
The NCAA, which makes APR data public, uses the scores to determine academic progress of athletic teams. Teams that fall below a certain metric could face penalties, including postseason ineligibility.
In discussing the APR score last year, Franklin cited the football program's 89-percent graduation success rate, another metric the NCAA uses to measure academic progress. That was 2 percentage points higher than the football program's previous GSR and seven points higher than the average of teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
Here's how current Big Ten's football teams fared in academic progress, according to the 2022-23 single-year APR scores. Data from the NCAA.
School
APR Score
1. Michigan
1,000
1. Minnesota
1,000
1. Ohio State
1,000
4. Northwestern
995
5. Wisconsin
994
6. Indiana
993
6. Iowa
993
8. UCLA
990
9. Washington
988
10. USC
987
11. Purdue
978
12. Nebraska
977
13. Rutgers
975
14. Illinois
965
15. Penn State
959
16. Michigan State
952
17. Maryland
931
18. Oregon
927
According to a news release, Penn State athletics reported an all-sport, multi-year APR average of 989, which exceeds the national average of 984. Nineteen Penn State programs reported APR scores of 1,000 during the 2022-23 academic year. They were baseball, men's cross country, women's cross country, women's fencing, field hockey, men's golf, women's golf, men's gymnastics, women's gymnastics, men's hockey, women's hockey, softball, women's soccer, men's swimming & diving, women's swimming & diving, men's tennis, women's tennis, women's track & field and men's volleyball.
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AllPennState is the place for Penn State news, opinion and perspective on the SI.com network. Publisher Mark Wogenrich has covered Penn State for more than 20 years, tracking three coaching staffs, three Big Ten titles and a catalog of great stories. Follow him on Twitter @MarkWogenrich.
MARK WOGENRICH
Mark Wogenrich is Editor and Publisher of AllPennState, the site for Penn State news on SI's FanNation Network. He has covered Penn State sports for more than two decades across three coaching staffs and three Rose Bowls.
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