Academic timing and the relative age effect in CIS football
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When organizations implement cut-off dates to define age groups, relative age effects (RAE) often emerge. This results in those born immediately after this date being advantaged while those born later are disadvantaged (Barnsley et al., 1985). Within intercollegiate athletic settings student-athletes often enter university at different ages. Therefore, it is important to consider the impact of academic timing (AT) when studying the RAE within this setting (Dixon et al., 2013). When a student’s actual athletic eligibility year corresponds with her/his projected athletic eligibility year (based on his/her birthdate), s/he is considered to be ‘academically on-time.’ Alternatively, if an individual’s athletic eligibility year corresponds with a younger cohort, s/he is considered to be ‘academically delayed.’ The current investigation examines AT and the RAE in Canadian interuniversity football. The birthdate and athletic eligibility status of male football student-athletes during the Fall 2013 season was collected from eligibility certificates obtained from the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) office ( n = 1421). We subdivided our sample to identify those student-athletes who were academically on-time or delayed, and conducted separate analyses on each subsample. Our results revealed no RAE among the overall sample of student-athletes. However, once accounting for AT, we found a significant traditional RAE among the on-time student-athletes ( p < 0.01), while no RAE was found among the academically delayed student-athletes. In an interview on 60 Minutes, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the implications of parents delaying their children from commencing kindergarten stating, “if everyone does it then the effect is canceled out” (CBS Interactive, 2012). As Gladwell has forewarned, if all student-athletes delayed their athletic eligibility, the potential advantages for relatively younger student-athletes are nullified. In fact, it appears that relatively younger student-athletes must delay their eligibility in CIS football by more than one year to even have an equal chance at participating.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".