Those charged with delivering the details of Division I's recently adopted academic-reform structure are going to have to put on their thinking CAPs.

Indeed, the division's newest committee -- the Committee on Academic Performance (CAP) -- may quickly become its most intriguing, since members will be handed the reform baton and expected to complete the race to the graduation-rate finish line.

Over the past 18 months, the Division I Board of Directors has adopted tougher eligibility standards and -- most recently -- a disincentives structure to hold institutions accountable for meeting them. What still remains, though, is setting the bar for acceptable academic performance. That's CAP's job, and a captivated Division I audience awaits the results.

The bars to be set are in the Academic Progress Rate (APR), a term that certainly by now is emblazoned in most athletics administrators' minds, since the data-driven rate that drives academic reform has been nearly two years in the making. The APR is a term-by-term calculation of student-athlete academic progress for every Division I team. Student-athletes earn a maximum of two points -- one for eligibility and one for retention -- for each term, and the team's total points (divided by the total points possible) constitute its APR. Pilot APR data were collected for a period covering 1997 through 2000 in football, basketball, baseball and track, and full APR data are being collected for the 2003-04 academic year in all sports. By next fall, the more than 6,100 Division I teams can be ranked via the APR.

The Committee on Academic Performance, then, is the group that will recommend cut points in the APR rankings below which teams will be subject to receiving disincentives. For example, the CAP might recommend that the line be drawn at 50 percent of the APR spectrum, or 40 percent or 30 percent. Teams missing the mark would be "eligible" for penalties. There likely will be two of those cut points -- one for contemporaneous penalties and another for so-called historically based penalties. The former preclude teams from immediately re-awarding the scholarships of players who have left the institution and would not have been academically eligible to compete had they returned. The latter punish teams that have lagged below a four-year APR calculation with a progression of restrictions, beginning with scholarship reductions and postseason bans and culminating in -- if the academic under-performance continues -- restricted membership status.

A motivational tool

As has been stated from the beginning of the academic-reform movement, the goal is to increase student-athlete academic performance and, ultimately, graduation rates, a long-time Board of Directors desire. Board members adopted the current eligibility standards based on research that identifies what graduates look like. Studies showed that student-athletes who reach 40 percent of their academic requirements after the first two years, 60 percent after three and 80 percent after four are very likely to graduate. Board members don't think those are unreasonable benchmarks, and they've adopted the disincentives structure to encourage the membership to agree.

"The point of this entire effort is to improve the academic performance of our student-athletes, not to penalize. But you have to use the threat of penalties as a way to motivate the improved performance," said University of Hartford President Walter Harrison, who now finds himself chairing the group that will recommend where those lines in the motivational sand are drawn.

It's a task Harrison is willing to accept. As a Board member, he heard the discussion months ago about establishing a Committee on Academic Performance, and the need for presidential involvement on that group. Because he couldn't agree more -- and because Harrison believes you shouldn't advocate action if you're not willing to do it yourself -- he added a CAP to his Division I governance wardrobe.

To Harrison, the goals are simply stated, though complex in their methodology.

"There are two primary purposes," he said of the group that will meet for the first time in July. "The most immediate will be to finish designing the way that the policies and procedures involving academic reform will work, and to recommend those final touches to the Board. Once that is in place, CAP will monitor the reform structure over time and serve as an appeals group once penalties begin being issued."

The complexities are in the cut points. Harrison said he wants the committee to have a good idea of where to draw the line for the contemporaneous penalties by as early as October. That way the Board can finalize the bar by January and the Division I membership will have the spring semester to know where to find safe harbor before penalties are assessed in fall 2005. Division I institutions already will be receiving letters this coming fall that indicate where their teams resided in the pilot APR rankings, which will give under-performing teams a year-long jump on rectifying their rank, at least in the pilot APR sports.

Harrison said he'll want to determine a meaningful mark for contemporaneous penalties, though there might be pressure from the membership to back off. But he wants to use the disincentives as a motivational tool rather than a punitive hammer.

"My own view," he said, "is for the cut points to serve as motivation to improve so that you don't get caught up in the penalties. That's why you want to give people some advance notice.

"But any time you draw a line, someone just below the line -- someone who may not be that different from someone just above the line -- is not going to be happy. That's the case whether you're talking about admissions to college, hiring people for a job or selecting teams for postseason play. It's imperative, then, that we be able to justify why we put the line where we did."

Eligibility - retention = graduation

Harrison said the cut-point determination will have to be data-driven. The challenge is, though, that there aren't as much data to go on in setting the bar for contemporaneous penalties -- which needs to be done next year -- as there will be for setting the bar for the historically based penalties after three more years of APR data are collected. The latter data pool will begin showing graduation success, and the CAP can use that in determining what is an acceptable APR over the long haul.

Jack Evans, a CAP member and faculty athletics representative at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the committee will be able to recommend a cut point for historically based penalties by examining the relationship between APR data and graduation success.

"The basic facts of the APR are that when student-athletes are on track to graduate, they earn points for eligibility and retention," Evans said. "When we have three years of data, there will be student-athletes who are far enough along that we'll know whether they're going to graduate in four or five years.

"If the overall objective is to improve graduation success, then it makes sense to look at the data that way."

But Evans acknowledged that the cut points for the contemporaneous penalties will be based on a smaller data set, simply because of the difference in time. While that could be a daunting task, Evans emphasized that setting cut points and handing out penalties are two very different things. The cut points merely identify those teams that are eligible to receive the contemporaneous disincentive. They will not actually be penalized unless they have a student-athlete who leaves in poor academic standing.

"As long as student-athletes remain eligible, institutions escape the contemporaneous penalty even though their teams might be eligible for it based on the APR cut," Evans said.

Honing in on hoops

One thing CAP members already know is that no matter where they recommend drawing the line, a disproportionate number of men's basketball teams will fall below it. The Board of Directors already has seen the effects of drawing the line at various percentiles. Based on APR pilot data, it is projected that 76 percent of men's basketball programs would fall below a 50 percent cut line, compared with 64 percent of baseball programs, 56 percent of football teams and 51 percent of men's track squads. In the year 2000 alone, APR pilot data show that 146 teams (45 percent) would have incurred at least one contemporaneous penalty (loss of scholarship replacement). Remember that this is a sport whose coaches adamantly opposed the "five/eight" rule on initial counters. The pilot APR results indicate that the contemporaneous penalty might be even harsher, since it affects each case and not just cases beyond a total of five. But the five/eight rule's primary downfall was that it affected even those teams that met or exceeded academic expectations. Those programs now escape the contemporaneous hit.

Men's basketball doesn't fare much better at the 40th percentile in the APR pilot data. The percentage of teams eligible for the contemporaneous penalty (61 percent) remains higher than baseball (57), football (48) and men's track (38). At the 30th percentile, it's still 55 percent for men's basketball, and even at the 20th percentile it's 43 percent, 11 percentage points higher than the next sport (baseball).

Those statistics aren't surprising too many people, though, since men's basketball traditionally has shown lower graduation rates than any other cohort.

"Going in, I assumed that men's basketball and football would be the two sports with low profiles," Harrison said. "That turned out to be true, though I was a little surprised that baseball fared as poorly as it did.

"But I don't want to get hung up on which sports receive most of the disincentives. This will be a case of finding a cut point that makes sense across sports. I'm interested in the success of all student-athletes. If they're not succeeding academically, it doesn't matter whether they're in lacrosse, swimming or basketball. My goal is to see student-athletes succeed both as athletes and as students. If they're not doing well, we need to look at the programs, regardless of the sport."

Harrison also emphasized that whatever line is drawn will not be arbitrary. NCAA cut points in initial eligibility under Prop 16 in fact had to withstand a legal challenge. The APR cut point is different, experts say, because unlike the initial-eligibility line that could identify specific individuals who were affected, the APR cut is an aggregate line that affects teams. Still, Harrison said, a data-driven line will be the most defensible line. He said he'll want the CAP to focus specifically on two "filters" in the APR, the first of which compares a team's APR to those in the vast Division I pool in all sports, and the second of which is a sport-to-spot comparison. That, he said, should determine where there's a need for improvement.

To be sure, though, it will be a challenge for the committee to be completely objective. In one sense, "grading" teams based on an APR will be like assigning grades to English themes. There may not be one size to fit all. But that doesn't scare Harrison, either, since he's an English professor by trade.

"If you take the same essay and put it in front of a number of English professors, 95 percent of them will agree whether it's a pass or fail," he said. "Our committee, which is composed of members who know what academic performance looks like, will be able to accomplish much the same thing with a given team. And we'll have statistics to go by to further strengthen the correlation.

"I'm very confident we can find cut points that make sense. Does that mean they won't be challenged? No, they will be, especially by those who fall just below the cut. But what I'll look for is consistency and a clear sense of why we chose the lines we did. Once that's done, I'm hoping coaches and athletics administrators will see what they have to do and will work to improve student-athletes' academic achievement. That's the whole point."

The whole cut point, that is.

CAP charge

The Committee on Academic Performance has been charged with the following primary duties:

Oversee the process governing data collection, analysis and calculation used to determine the Academic Progress Rate, the Graduation Success Rate and the Academic Performance Census.

Formulate and revise as needed, a statement of the established operating policies and procedures of the academic performance program.

Determine the appropriate standards on which penalties or rewards apply, notify members of such standards, and notify institutions or teams that fail to satisfy the appropriate standards under which contemporaneous and historically based penalties apply.

Oversee the administration of a public-recognition program for institutions or teams that demonstrate academic excellence under the academic performance program.

Hear appeals of institutions or teams subject to penalty (or penalties) (both contemporaneous and historically based) and any other matters of appeal pursuant to the legislation and policies and procedures of the academic performance program.

Recommend changes to the academic performance program based on research data analysis and practical experience.