By Collin Mickle

Published: May 6, 2008

Four years into the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rating, Auburn’s athletic department remains among the better-performing schools in the Southeastern Conference.

The latest APR numbers, released Tuesday, give most of AU’s intercollegiate sports a passing grade.

The APR measures each sport’s performance in retaining student-athletes and ensuring they perform academically. A team must score at least a 925 on a 1,000-point scale to avoid the possibility of penalties.

Men’s golf, the highest-performing AU team, scored a perfect 1,000.

Football scored a 953, placing AU among the top 70 percent of Division I football programs.

Only three Auburn sports scored below 925: Baseball (924), indoor and outdoor men’s track (912 and 914) and men’s basketball (905).

Women’s basketball scored exactly 925.

A team’s APR score is determined by assigning each student-athlete up to two points per semester, one for remaining eligible and one for staying with his or her current school.

Teams that score under 925 are in danger of losing a scholarship, but only if a player leaves that team while academically ineligible. As long as those programs can retain their players — or make sure that any departures stay eligible — they can avoid penalty.

Men’s basketball’s 905 was the lowest among AU’s intercollegiate sports. But the NCAA said head coach Jeff Lebo’s team avoided any punishment “due to the team’s demonstrated academic improvement and favorable comparison based on other academic or institutional factors.”

The “other factors” could be related to improvement in the past year: Auburn associate athletic director Mark Richard told the Associated Press that the men’s basketball team scored a perfect 1,000 last year.

That score significantly raised the four-year average, which had been below 900.

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