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Faculty Athletics Committee reviews student-athlete surveys, academic advising

The Faculty Athletic Committee spoke about exit surveys and interviews that student athletes partake in a meeting on Tuesday.

The Faculty Athletic Committee spoke about exit surveys and interviews that student athletes partake in a meeting on Tuesday.

The Faculty Athletics Committee met Tuesday to discuss student-athlete exit interviews and surveys, pending NCAA legislation and student-athlete academic advising.

Nicki Moore, senior associate athletic director, gave an overview of the newest student-athlete exit surveys and interviews. She said UNC-Chapel Hill’s policies on the exit surveys and interviews go beyond the NCAA minimum requirements.

“We’re doing a much more thorough job than most other schools I know of,” Moore said.

One change occurring this year is that the exit surveys will be conducted more than once a year to better reflect the sports seasons, according to Moore.

“In reality we have three different seasons, we’ve got fall sports, winter sports and spring sports,” Moore said. “So one of the adjustments that we’re planning to make this year to try to continue to increase response rates and hopefully to capture student-athlete responses more near to when they actually finish their sport is to distribute the survey online three different times.”

The exit surveys are conducted online through Qualtrics survey software and sports administrators conduct the exit interviews, Moore said.

“We try to make the things in the exit interview things we couldn’t get from the survey,” Moore said.

Committee member Lissa Broome gave an overview of the pending NCAA legislation, specifically the autonomy legislation that will be voted on in January.

The autonomy proposals she highlighted concerned limits to Countable Athletically Related Activity, limits to off-campus practice during a vacation during the non-championship segment or spring football practice period, limits to missing class time for media activities and increased opportunities for spending on student-athlete participation in elite national events.

“There’s a desire in these autonomy conferences to deregulate these kinds of things,” Vince Ille, senior associate athletic director, said.

Three representatives from the Academic Advising Program — Lee May, Andrea Caldwell and Spencer Welborn — discussed the evolving role of academic advising in the lives of student-athletes.

Caldwell said student-athlete academic advising is a holistic process rather than just focusing on class selection. She said both the Academic Advising Program and the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes provide advice in areas such as balancing athletics with classes, career planning, major and minor exploration, campus resources, degree progress and NCAA eligibility standards.

The AAP has partnered with the ASPSA to provide a more comprehensive advising support system for student athletes, Welborn said. He said the programs' goal is to evolve so advising is a more value-added experience rather than just a checkbox.

In the 2015-16 school year, 99.8 percent of student-athletes met with advisors in the fall and 98 percent met with advisors in the spring, up from just 72.4 percent in 2013, Welborn said.

“I think we can say we’ve really seen a culture change,” May said.

university@dailytarheel.com

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