The Division I Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet's ongoing review of initial- and continuing-eligibility standards has taken on a new urgency now that the legal climate has changed in the NCAA's favor.

An appeals court's decision in May to deny plaintiffs in the Cureton case their request to amend a complaint to assert intentional discrimination effectively ended the case and revived the cabinet's review of Prop 16, the NCAA's initial-eligibility standards.

Though the cabinet, which met June 20-22 in San Francisco, has not recommended that any modifications be made to Prop 16, two of its subcommittees are reviewing data that could lead to proposals for change.

The data are from the NCAA's Academic Performance Census (APC), which tracks academic behaviors of Division I student-athletes between 1994 and the present. The research assesses graduation status after six years for all Division I student-athletes (about 26,000 a year), first-year outcomes and graduation status for all Division I student-athletes who are on athletically related financial aid (about 13,000 a year), and yearly outcomes on a sample of Division I student-athletes receiving athletics aid.

The cabinet's initial- and continuing-eligibility subcommittees studied the data that may indicate a link between initial and continuing eligibility. What has been discussed is to weight high-school academic parameters differently (test scores, high-school core courses and core-course grade-point average currently are weighted equally) in order to perhaps increase access and rely more on continuing-eligibility standards in college to better predict college graduation.

While such discussions are preliminary, the subcommittees met with the NCAA's initial-eligibility consultants and the NCAA research staff to develop principles to guide them in their review.

The principles to be followed in developing any proposals to modify the NCAA's current academic standards are as follows:

Initial and continuing eligibility should apply uniformly to all student-athletes;

Student-athletes deemed ineligible should be permitted to practice and receive aid, but shall be precluded from traveling with or competing for their institution;

Penalties for academic ineligibility should apply uniformly to all student-athletes;

The number of core courses currently required for initial eligibility should not increase;

The concept of freshman ineligibility is not supported;

A seamless model for initial and continuing eligibility should be pursued to incorporate both components of a student-athlete's academic performance;

Disparate impacts, if any, that current initial-eligibility rules have on various constituencies should be minimized; and

A disjunctive or linear rule for initial- and continuing-eligibility standards should be pursued.

"We want to produce a set of academic rules that are steeped in the research data that we have," said cabinet Chair David Knight, faculty athletics representative at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "We now have sufficient research to justify a review of the standards and we are working to ensure that our standards are in keeping with what we now know."

Knight said the data were essential in developing the principles guiding further review. Though the APC has not been finalized, preliminary findings indicate that the high-school academic profile might be better used to predict grades after the first year of college instead of predicting college graduation.

"Up to now, we have used high-school parameters to predict college graduation, which has only been modestly successful," Knight said. "What we're considering is to use satisfactory progress in college as the major predictor of college graduation."

"Taking the rule from 13 to 15 would not significantly impact a large number of students," Knight said.

He also said the cabinet's pursuit of a "disjunctive or linear rule for initial- and continuing-eligibility standards" in the final principle means that the cabinet is considering rules in which prospects would be eligible if they had satisfied two of the three high-school parameters, rather than the current "conjunctive" rule in which prospects must satisfy all three. Those discussions, however, are in the early stages.

The point of the review, Knight said, is to determine whether modifications are necessary to improve graduation rates, something that college and university presidents have been interested in doing for several years.

"The presidents continue to say that our academic regulations should be predicated on their impact on graduation," Knight said. "Graduation rates are important, and the methodology by which you calculate them become important. So, we're discussing alternate methodologies in calculating graduation rates."

The cabinet's timeline for review would be to develop proposals within the next year and introduce them into the Division I legislative pipeline for the Board of Directors' final review in October 2002.

Other highlights

Division I Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet
June 20-22/San Francisco

Continued review of Proposal No. 2000-85 regarding admissions and graduation-rate disclosure for transfers and agreed to pursue the matter further at its September meeting. The cabinet expressed general support for excluding transfers in the graduation rate of the school from which the student-athlete transferred (so long as he or she is in good academic standing), and including them in the graduation rate of the school the student-athlete transfers to (so long as he or she graduates in the prescribed amount of time). The cabinet agreed, however, that its initial-and continuing-eligibility subcommittees will evaluate ideas that capture those concepts and discuss them in September.

Supported a proposal from the National Association of Basketball Coaches to request emergency legislation to amend the end of this year's men's basketball fall contact period from October 14 to October 5. Since the fist day of practice falls on October 13 this year, the proposal asks to shorten the end of the recruiting so that coaches won't be faced with deciding whether to be on the road or at practice on the 13th.