The Graduation Success Rate (GSR) plays a critical role supporting the NCAA’s Collegiate Model of amateur college athletics. The NCAA created the GSR to correct a statistical bias in the legally mandated Federal Graduation Rate (FGR) that causes it to underestimate rates. But the GSR’s attempted correction causes it to overestimate rates. This paper reports the first estimate of the size of this statistical bias. The focus is on the big revenue sport of men’s basketball in the so-called Power Conferences. The small size of basketball squads allows a reasonably accurate estimate of GSR cohort sizes based on publically available data. This in turn enables the calculation of a “corrected” GSR. The results indicate that the GSR exaggeration is large, perhaps as much as 20 percentage points. This raises fundamental questions about the success of the GSR as a useful graduation rate metric.

中文翻译：

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NCAA的毕业成功率：有多成功？

毕业成功率（GSR）在支持NCAA业余大学田径学院模型中起着至关重要的作用。NCAA创建了GSR，以纠正法律强制规定的联邦毕业率（FGR）导致其低估利率的统计偏差。但是，GSR尝试进行修正会导致其高估利率。本文报告了此统计偏差的大小的第一个估计值。重点是所谓的Power Conferences中的男子篮球大收益运动。篮球队的规模很小，因此可以根据可公开获得的数据合理准确地估算GSR队列规模。反过来，这使得能够计算“校正的” GSR。结果表明，GSR的夸张程度很大，可能高达20个百分点。