Add "APR," "925," "0-for-2," "contemporaneous penalties," "10 percent cap," "historically based penalties," "confidence boundary" and "graduation success rate" to the NCAA dictionary. Over the course of the next year and beyond, those terms will be the vernacular in Division I as member institutions familiarize themselves with an academic version of an RPI that rewards eligibility, retention and graduation, and penalizes academically under-performing teams.

While most of the terminology has been conceptual during the three years since the Division I Board of Directors turned decisively toward academic reform, the Board's adoption in January of a cut score in the Academic Progress Rate (APR) under which teams would be subject to immediate penalties turned theory into practice.

That reality begins the week of February 14 when Division I presidents and chancellors receive 2003-04 APR data that show how their teams would have fared had the contemporaneous penalties been in place right now. But because the actual penalty phase of the new system won't be implemented until next year (based on two years of APR data), presidents and athletics directors can use the next six months to learn more about how the new structure works, and -- perhaps more importantly -- to right the academic ship if the current APR data indicate that teams have strayed.

Now that reform is real, questions about how it works have multiplied. Because the APR and its accompanying penalty structure are new and complex, those who haven't been intricately involved with their development are uncertain about some of the practical applications.

Simply put: (1) The APR is the real-time snapshot of every team's academic performance at a given time; (2) an APR score of 925 is what teams must meet to avoid contemporaneous penalties; and (3) teams below 925 will not be able to replace for one year the grants-in-aid of players who left as academic casualties during the previous academic year.

That makes 925 an important, but confusing, part of the new nomenclature. Right now, the only context that can be applied to the APR cut is that a 925 equates to a 50 percent graduation rate (under the current federally mandated methodology). But other APR numbers in and of themselves have little else to relate to.

University of Hartford President Walter Harrison, who chairs the group that developed the APR structure, acknowledged that the new system is "like announcing that we're going to have SAT scores for the first time and having nobody understand what an 1100 means."

"In time," he said, "925 in and of itself will mean something, but right now, it's understandable that people are struggling to figure it out."

Why 925?

Equating APR scores with graduation rates is exactly what Harrison's Committee on Academic Performance (CAP) did to find the right cut point for contemporaneous penalties in the first place.

The APR is calculated by allocating points for eligibility and retention -- the two factors that research identifies as the best indicators of graduation. Each player on a given roster earns a maximum of two points per term, one for being academically eligible and one for staying with the institution. A team's APR is the total points of a team's roster at a given time divided by the total points possible. Since this results in a decimal number, the CAP decided to multiply it by 1,000 for ease of reference. Thus, a raw APR score of .925 translates into the 925 that will become the standard terminology.

To effect behavior in the desired cohort -- teams with expected graduation rates below 50 percent -- the committee had to pick the commensurate line in the APR. Ironically, committee members believe the APR number eventually will be a more understandable target than telling schools to graduate 50 percent of their players would have been.

"In three years, it's my hope that people will understand an APR score without question," Harrison said. "But since this is a new metric, we needed to equate it with something. We had to explain how we decided 925 was the right number. That adds confusion, though, because the words 'graduation rate' have a certain meaning, and the APR isn't quite the same thing."

But Harrison emphasized that the APR is a much better -- and more reliable -- assessment of academic success than graduation rates because the latter relies on a six-year window, whereas the APR provides a real-time assessment.

Harrison, who will begin a term as chair of the NCAA Executive Committee in April, said, "Most people should embrace that. The APR is better because it is a term-by term, year-by-year calculation that provides a much more sensitive measurement of student-athlete academic performance."

Projecting graduation rates

In wanting to equate two different metrics, the CAP had to project the APR to graduation rates by making inferences about the true scores. Though the statistical calculation required to accomplish that is complex, the simple answer is that the committee had to "estimate" the average behavior of an entire team instead of evaluating a set of binary events (eligibility or retention, yes or no, for one student-athlete).

While this works well for larger squad sizes, even using only one year of data, it becomes more difficult to project with a high level of statistical confidence with smaller data sets. Thus, the CAP introduced a "confidence boundary" or "eligibility zone," which essentially places a band around a team's actual APR score, for use during the period of time where there is only a limited amount of APR data. The CAP determined that in such cases, a team's upper confidence boundary would be the cut-off line for contemporaneous penalties.

Hypothetically, then, a team with only 10 student-athletes in the cohort that compiles an APR of 920 would have a confidence boundary of 900-940. The upper confidence boundary is above 925, so this team would not be subject to penalty for this year. Essentially, the confidence boundary provides a temporary reprieve for teams on the APR cusp, but as more years of APR data are available and the sample sizes grow, the need for a confidence boundary will wane. That means it would be unwise for teams in the first year or two of APR calculations to believe they don't need to modify behavior if only their confidence boundary provides relief from contemporaneous penalties.

The projection of the APR to graduation rates has caused some people to complain that the rate being used is the federally mandated calculation that does not take transfers into account. While that is true, it is temporary. The NCAA currently is compiling its own Graduation Success Rate that should be released for the first time in the fall. Because the new methodology credits institutions for transfers who maintain eligibility, it is expected to reveal higher rates for student-athletes.

Though the Graduation Success Rate will not be used in the projection of 2003-04 or 2004-05 APR data, the CAP has indicated that in the future it wants to continue to focus on the cohort that the current 925 APR score identifies.

University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway, who chairs the Division I Board of Directors, said people should temper their concern about using the federal rate as a comparison for the first two years.

"Fortunately with our Graduation Success Rate, within a short time we'll have data that can be projected in a way that we all know is better," he said. "People should feel reassured that that's the principle we're going to follow. Until we can get to that point, though, we have to use the federal rate for this first projection because that's all we have.

"The federal rate is similar to what we eventually will use and consequently it provides valuable information, but you will have the protection of being able to include transfers in subsequent rates," he said.

Confusion about penalties

In addition to understanding the number 925, there also are misperceptions about the contemporaneous penalties themselves. The primary assumption is that teams under the 925 bar automatically lose scholarships. The fact is that falling below the 925 bar alone does not equate with contemporaneous penalties. Teams in that situation, though, are subject to them -- if they have lost players in the most recent term who would have been academically ineligible had they returned.

Such student-athletes are the "0-for-2" players who fail to earn the point for eligibility or the point for retention in the APR. Teams above the 925 APR cut-off that have an 0-for-2 player are not assessed the contemporaneous penalty.

Because the contemporaneous penalties are meant to be the "shot across the bow" and not the be-all/end-all punitive hammer, the CAP decided to limit the contemporaneous penalties that can be assessed to one team to about 10 percent of the team's financial aid limit. That includes rounding up to the next whole number for headcount sports. For example, in men's and women's basketball (both headcount sports), the maximum penalty would be two scholarships. In baseball (an equivalency sport with a maximum 11.7 grants-in-aid), the maximum penalty would be 1.17 scholarships.

"By limiting the amount of athletics aid included in the penalty, the contemporaneous penalties would serve as a catalyst to create change over the next several years where performance lags, but would not be overly punitive," Harrison said.

The heavier penalties are the so-called "historically based" punishments that are based on a rolling four-year average APR. They include loss of scholarships, postseason bans and restricted membership in severe cases where academic performance lags over time. The historically based penalties target the chronic academic under-performers with hard-hitting disincentives, while the contemporaneous penalties are designed to more gently coax a larger portion of the academic distribution into increased performance.

APR roll-out

The February mailing to presidents and chancellors will reflect final 2003-04 APR scores by team, and the overall APR for the institution. The report also will indicate any contemporaneous penalties that would have been applied had the system been in place this year. APR data will become public February 28, but contemporaneous-penalty data will not be made available, in accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

A bevy of educational resources about the APR will accompany data distribution. Also, the Academic Performance Program policy manual and user's guide available through NCAA Online will include answers to frequently asked questions, information about the development of the APR and a sample chart depicting results for a hypothetical team (some of those materials are included in the accompanying stories elsewhere in this issue). Educational sessions also will be conducted at this year's Regional Rules Seminars in May and June, and selected staff members will be available to attend conference meetings this summer.

Many of those educational and background materials will be included in the February mailing to presidents and chancellors. Harrison emphasized the importance of that data being sent directly to campus chief executive officers as a way to best effect change.

"That is key," he said. "We are asking presidents to take responsibility for the academic success of their student-athletes. Some presidents closely follow NCAA proceedings in this regard and others don't. For those who haven't carefully followed the development of the academic-reform structure, they're going to need to be able to understand what it means."

Presidents and chancellors will have access to the next set of preliminary APR data (which will include both the 2003-04 and 2004-05 reports) as early as September. Those two years of data will determine the first set of contemporaneous penalties. Institutions will be notified if they are subject to such penalties by December 2005.