65 out of an 85 scholarship limit team diagnosed w/ LD?

… Casey Schmidt, the psychologist who tested them and labeled them LD, works for Marks & Associates. The “Marks” is Jane Marks, whose husband is Tallahassee Mayor John Marks. I wonder how much money that firm pulls in for testing and declaring FSU athletes to have learning disabilities? I assume said practice is billing the State of Florida.

Florida State football fans chat about their football team… The practice of finding psychologists to declare huge swathes of the team disabled is much in the news lately, with the FSU cheating scandal still ongoing.

SB Nation begins its coverage with a conversation that occurred between an FSU football player and his academic advisor.

“You might as well know right off the bat, I can’t read,” he told her.

“Then how are we going to get through these college classes?” she asked.

“It’s easy,” he responded. “You get to read to me.”

Indeed, according to testimony from a former “learning specialist” at Florida State, Dr. Brenda Monk, as well as that of former All-World recruit Fred Rouse, it’s not uncommon for athletes with severe academic deficiencies to enroll at FSU.

Rouse–who was dismissed from FSU, and then UTEP, after starting as a freshman and drawing comparisons to Randy Moss–mentioned FSU star Antonio Cromartie as one player who truly could not read, and often slept through classes.

And he’s the perfect case study, really: having competed for two years at FSU, Cromartie took his game to the NFL, where he’s now an All-Pro cornerback. Had he been deprived of the college experience– college coaching and competition, specifically — Cromartie wouldn’t be where he is today. Should we shun players like Cromartie in the name of protecting the illusion of “student-athletes” and academic integrity?

Er, I guess not… I mean, as long as we’re willing to call institutions like Florida State University — complete with a cohort of professors who devise courses that have CHEAT THROUGH ME written all over them (it takes a village) — by their real name.

Here’s the original ESPN article. Excerpts:

… With a documented learning disabled diagnosis, athletes can get relief from the NCAA in meeting its minimum academic requirements for initial eligibility. They can apply for approval to submit SAT or ACT scores that were acquired through “non-standard” tests in which special accommodations were provided, and use high school courses for LD students to satisfy the NCAA’s core-course requirements.

The NCAA granted 527 of these waivers to incoming athletes in the 2008-09 school year, up from 310 the year before, according to NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn. (There were 302 in 2006-07, 335 in 2005-06 and 338 in 2004-05.) She said more athletes are taking advantage of those waivers because in the past two years the NCAA has raised the core-course requirements (from 14 to 16 classes), and mandated that core courses be earned in the first eight semesters of high school.

If the prospective athlete still can’t qualify with those adjustments in standards, the college they have signed with can apply with the NCAA for a waiver to grant eligibility anyway. Some of these waivers provide only partial relief, meaning that an athlete might receive an athletic scholarship and can participate in practice, but may not compete in games until meeting the NCAA’s progress-toward-degree requirements at the end of his/her freshman year.

Once on campus, a learning disabled athlete can ask for an NCAA waiver that allows him or her to take less than a full course load (12 hours) in a given semester. And at Florida State, the athlete can be exempted from passing the state-mandated basic competency tests in math and English that all at-risk college students must take before their junior year. “A good number of athletes come through the waiver system,” says Jennifer Buchanan, chair of the CLAST (College Level Academic Skills Test) Waiver Committee at FSU.

Beyond that, some learning disabled athletes drink from a fire hose of course assistance. At Florida State, classroom accommodations, such as note-takers and untimed tests, are dispensed by the campus disability center that is available to all students. But athletes also have the resources of a $1.5 million-a-year athletic academic support unit with 32 computers, private tutoring rooms and a five-station “Learning Center” for athletes with learning disabilities or deficiencies.

… Fred Rouse, a former Seminoles receiver, attributes the prevalence of learning disabled athletes to an awareness of the resources available to those with such a diagnosis. He says some players are just lazy and looking for someone else to do their academic work.

“I think it’s bull—-,” says Rouse, who started as a freshman in 2006. “You [as a high school athlete] have all of this time to prepare [academically] before you get to this level, and then when you get here, you play this punk role as, you know, ‘I have a learning disability,’ when that’s not the case.”

Some athletes arrived in Tallahassee with such a diagnosis, from psycho-educational evaluations conducted when they were in high school or earlier. Others, as many as 20 per year who were identified as academically at-risk, were referred by Monk after they arrived on campus to Casey Schmidt, a licensed psychologist based in Tallahassee. Schmidt evaluates these athletes for learning disabilities and is paid $800 by the athletic department for each test.

About 80 percent of the FSU athletes sent to him receive a learning disabled diagnosis, says Schmidt, who was hired after Monk arrived on campus. [Get that number!]

Schmidt said “people aren’t sophisticated enough” to tank his tests, which are cross-referenced and take the better part of a day to complete. But he concedes that he is surprised at the high rate of learning disabilities in the FSU athlete population he has evaluated. “That’s a question mark I don’t know how to rectify,” he said.

One possible explanation is the assessment tool he uses. It’s known as the “simple discrepancy” model, which looks for an imbalance between a person’s IQ and educational achievement level. The FSU athletes he’s evaluated, he said, often have normal or advanced IQs, but poor academic skills. In his estimation, any college student with less than a ninth-grade reading or math level is a strong candidate to meet the criteria for a learning disabled diagnosis.

Schmidt gives them an additional, cognitive test to minimize the rate of false positives, he said.

Still, the simple discrepancy method has been criticized by some experts as unreliable. A 2003 study by Florida State researchers Briley Proctor and Frances Prevatt found that that model “diagnosed significantly more students with LD than the other three [established] models.” In fact, in testing of the same set of students, the simple discrepancy model produced a learning disabled diagnosis 46.5 percent of the time, nearly twice the rate of the most conservative model.

Based on their research, Proctor and Prevatt adopted a new model in 2006 for the LD assessments done at the FSU campus facility they run, the Adult Learning Evaluation Center, which is available to all students. The athletic department continues to refer athletes off campus to Schmidt, and his diagnoses are accepted by various campus groups that process waivers and provide LD services. They are required to, by laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled.

“There’s no universally agreed upon way to do these tests,” Schmidt said…