An Examination of the Impact of Relative Age Effects and Academic Timing on Intercollegiate Athletics Participation in Women’s Softball
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This investigation makes three noteworthy contributions to literature on the Relative Age Effect (RAE); 1) it adds to the small number of studies in women’s sports, 2) it is one of very few papers to examine the RAE in intercollegiate athletics, and 3) it (re-)introduces “academic timing” to the discussion of RAEs in this context. The 50 top-ranked NCAA Division I women’s softball teams at the conclusion of the 2011 season served as the focus for this investigation. Student-athletes were grouped into quartiles according to their birth date and identified as “on-time” or “academically delayed” based on their birth year and eligibility status. On-time student-athletes were over four times more likely to be born in quartile one than in quartile four, demonstrating a traditional RAE. This pattern was reversed for those who were academically delayed, with quartile four birth dates constituting more than half of the entire sample.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".