My only confusion is wouldn't everyone know ahead of time the exact grades he would need to be eligible {pure math} so wouldn't it be a quick decision after the classes ended whether the grades he earned were good enough? Wouldn't Roberson himself, the NCAA know the very day he got the grades whether he was eligible or not? Only way I could think it wasn't clear is if the validity of the classes themselves were in question or if the bureaucratic procedure or deadlines to submit the grades weren't followed. I admit I don't know the process but something doesn't seem to add up to take this long to make a decision.
A few things have to happen:
1. He needs to send in his official final transcript.
2. He needs to send in transcripts from any other schools that he attended and plans to use courses from.
3. All those courses need to already be approved by the Clearinghouse. If they aren't, you can add a lot more time to the process.
4. Often, school A sends school B's transcript, and it's unofficial. They will then need to get an official transcript from the other school.
5. Sometimes when kids transfer duplicate courses are taken and the student thinks they get credit for both.
Example: World History is an approved course at School A. History of the World is an approved course at School B. If the University and the student were using both of those in their evaluations of the student's eligibility, but the NCAA comes along and does a course comparison and determines they overlap - well, those credits are gone, and if they were both high grades, his total average could take a serious hit from what everyone (student, high school, Syracuse) thought they were going to get going in.
6. He could be just short, not cleared, and now a waiver is in play (if they still do those).
I know I wrote about some of this in the other thread - but tons of happens behind the scenes that can really lengthen the process. If you attend some school that has never had many kids go through the process the school is often a HUGE obstacle. Although typically with higher profile athletes it isn't the case, and the University will hold their hands throughout the process as well so someone like Roberson would usually be okay in that area. Still, it can be problematic if they keep sending in unofficial documents, or trying to send another schools unofficial docs.
Other issues:
ACT/SAT flags a score - not much you can do if that happens. No rhyme or reason as to why scores are flagged sometimes either.
Changing course names. If his high school changed their Spanish 1 class in 2012 to Espanol 1 - course review can come into play and they may need a syllabus/course description. Sometimes the schools start sending them for the old course or don't have them for the new course title yet. Getting those from certain schools can take a bit. This happened in NYS a lot because they changed up their names for Math classes so much. 'Course I' becomes 'Algebra' then changes to 'Course 1' then, etc.....ridiculous, yes, but that's the NCAA!
School two converted his grades to their scale without weighting properly, everyone used the wrong scale (parents/school/student) and his GPA is lower than expected. (An 85 at Frosh school was a B-, at school two they use the 85, but on their scale that's a B) Again, less likely with bigger schools/high profile athletes.
