The Penn State football team improved its academic performance for the the second straight academic year, according to new NCAA data. The NCAA recently released it 2025 NCAA Division I Academic Progress Rate report, which tracks athletes' progress in the classroom.
Penn State football reported a one-year APR of 976 for the 2023-24 academic year, higher than its score of 959 in 2022-23. The latest score marked the second consecutive year in which the football program improved its performance after reporting an APR of 914 during the 2021-22 academic year, which its lowest in a decade. Penn State football reported a perfect one-year APR of 1,000 for the 2018-19 academic year.
Penn State appealed its 2021-22 APR score, citing transfers and other factors that impacted the score, trustee Brandon Short said in an interview. The NCAA denied the appeal, Spotlight PA reported last year.
Penn State's multi-year APR of 947 ranked 17th among 18 Big Ten schools, ahead of Oregon (946). Ohio State, which won the College Football Playoff national championship, was the only Big Ten school to report a multi-year APR of 1,000, the highest score possible.
The NCAA calculates APR through a formula that awards one point per athlete who remains on pace to earn a degree and one point for athletes who stay with the school (or graduate) at the end of an academic term.
The NCAA says that APR "holds institutions accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes through a team-based metric that accounts for the eligibility and retention of each student-athlete for each academic term." APR data is available to the public on the NCAA's database.
Twenty-three Penn State teams recored perfect one-year APR scores of 1,000 in 2023-24. That includes Penn State's national championship teams in wrestling and women's volleyball. Penn State's 14 women's programs all recorded perfect one-year APR scores of 1,000.
Penn State men's basketball recorded a single-year APR of 1,000, which followed its 2022-23 score of 952. That score was impacted by transfers into and out of the program in head coach Mike Rhoades' first season with the Nittany Lions.
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