Last week, the NCAA announced a new set of standards that will have a profoundly negative impact on major college athletics for years to come.

The powers that be decided to favor subjective grades much more than standardized test scores as a way to determine eligibility to play in collegiate sports.

Money corrupts human judgment, and the Pandora’s box this will open will be difficult for the NCAA or anyone else to contain.

To make the minimum score, athletes now need only to achieve a 400 on their SATs as opposed to the old minimum of 820. All the student-athlete needs to do is go to the test, sign his name and he – the players who this will affect will almost always be in men’s basketball and football – has met the standardized testing requirements to enter school. To compensate for the delegation of the SAT scores the NCAA will make grades in high school – and once the students are in college, their college grades – more important in determining eligibility.

The new system is based more on a sliding scale. The better athletes do on either their grades or the SATs, the worse they can do in either the classroom or on the standardized test.

The NCAA said these new rules will make life fairer for everyone. To me, it seems more likely that the NCAA is bowing to pressure from school officials who don’t want to see any more of their best recruits sit out a year or never even attend their school as a result of an inability to acheive the minimum SAT score.

First off, the argument that standardized testing and the SATs in particular are deeply culturally-biased is over-dramatized.

Sure, some cultures, most specifically white suburban culture, have it easier when taking the SATs.

But, sorry to say, no matter what race or culture you are a product of, if you can’t get an 820 on your SATs, nine times out of 10 you will not be a productive member in the college classroom. A nationally administered test can only be so biased, and the SAT people have gone a long way in recent years to relieve most of these cultural differences.

So fine, proponents of this new rule argue that high school grades are more indicative of a student’s classroom skills and will do the job in preventing unsuitable students from attending school.

However, what this will actually mean is now even more high school administrators and teachers will be forced by varying influences to give out unwarranted grades.

Because an administrator can’t pressure a Scantron, the rules will just make it easier for college administrators, coaches and others to use their magic in pressuring high schools to dole out unwarranted high grades to undeserving students so they can attend their university. Also, how many teachers would want to be known as the person who prevented player X from playing for major state university Y?

Furthermore, there are now, and soon to be more, prep schools – like the recently exposed Christopher Robin in New York City – whose sole intention is to find underachieving students and give them high grades so they can be sent off to college unprepared but eligible.

The end result is students will continue to get a free ride in school and are therefore robbed of any real chance of getting a decent education. The kid will just have no major motivation to really try to learn when everyone around him is more concerned about what his grades are than what he is actually learning.

One saving grace for many students who had difficulty in high school was once they entered their university they were able to take remedial classes to help them adjust to college life. Under the new guidelines, the NCAA has actually cut back the allowable hours for those helpful classes.

So, in short, more and more under-qualified students with less of a chance at adjusting to college life will be entering colleges across the nation.

College sports have countless numbers of success stories. The average student athlete actually receives higher grades than the rest of the student body. However, some people just aren’t cut out or ready to attend universities such as Ohio State. The college in major college sports is already somewhat of a farce, but now the NCAA is doing its best to make it a complete joke.

Mike White is a senior in journalism. He is deeply concerned about the new direction the NCAA is taking. He can be reached at [email protected].