The academic index is used to make sure hockey players fall within a certain
class of people who are admitted to the school.  Some ridiculous formula is
used that combines GPA, SAT scores, and whatever else to decide what the
average of the freshman class is, and then hockey players must fall within
a certain percentage of that.  Unfortunately these are about the last schools
in America to rate people based on raw numbers and also to put such a high
weight on the SAT.  Not to mention that people who may not have as high
GPAs or SAT scores won't necessarily do awful in college; in fact, the
reverse is often true, especially if someone is going to go through the
trouble of trying to get into one of the great schools in the ECAC.  Or
that a student or hockey player may have come from a high school where many
students were particularly bright, so a player who may have been in the
top 50% of his class might have been in the top 25% elsewhere - but all the
index will look at is what rank you were in your graduating class.  There
are so many holes in the index, it's outrageous.
 
WMPL is in Michigan.  WMEB is in Orono.  I really don't know
how the locations have any bearing, I thought the voters were supposedly
geographically distributed about equally - but I don't know for sure.
 
 
- mike