The Division I Board of Directors in January adopted a cut score in the APR under which teams will be subject to contemporaneous penalties. That action, which in effect officially kicked off the implementation phase of academic reform, has prompted enough "what ifs," "how comes" and "why nots" to warrant a refresher course on the new system's terminology.

• Academic Progress Rate (APR). The APR is the fulcrum upon which the entire academic-reform structure rests. Developed as a more real-time assessment of teams' academic performance than the six-year graduation-rate calculation provides, the APR awards two points each term to student-athletes who meet academic-eligibility standards and who remain with the institution. A team's APR is the total points earned by the team at a given time divided by the total points possible.

• 925. This is the cut score the Board of Directors approved for contemporaneous penalties. While APR scores in and of themselves will, over time, become meaningful numbers to the membership and general public, at present, they do not have significant context. So for purposes of discussion, APR scores have been translated to graduation rates. A raw APR score of .925 translates to about a 50 percent federal graduation rate. To simplify the calculation, APR scores are multiplied by 1,000.

• Confidence boundary. Small sample sizes of some teams can lead to reduced confidence in the APR as an estimate of academic performance for those teams. That is particularly true with only one or two years of data. Confidence intervals, commonly used in statistics, roughly represent a range of scores within which the true APR likely resides. That means the "upper confidence boundary" of a team's APR would have to be below 925 for that team to be subject to contemporaneous penalties. The confidence boundary is a short-term tool, however, and will go away as more data become available.

• Quarter school variance. Schools that are on a quarter system instead of a semester system were found to have an unintended advantage in APR calculations simply because of the number of reporting occasions and not because of academic performance. Because the reporting of APR is done at two occasions for semester schools but at three occasions for quarter schools, a slight numerical advantage can accrue from the extra reporting occasion. To account for the disparity, a statistical formula will be applied to slightly alter quarter school APRs. A technical analysis of the quarter school variance can be found at www.ncaa.org.

• 0-for-2. This term is the equivalent of a four-letter-word when it comes to reform. An "0-for-2" student-athlete is one who is neither academically eligible nor remains with the institution. An 0-for-2 player might be one who transfers, leaves the institution for personal reasons or leaves to turn pro and would not have been academically eligible had he or she returned. Obviously, these are the types of situations the academic-reform structure is most meant to address since they are the most damaging to a team's APR. While teams cannot always control the reasons student-athletes leave, the contemporaneous penalty holds them accountable for at least making sure student-athletes are academically eligible during their college tenures.

• Contemporaneous penalties. These are the most immediate penalties in the academic-reform structure, and they occur when a team under an APR score of 925 loses a student-athlete who would not have been academically eligible had he or she returned (an "0-for-2" player). A contemporaneous penalty means that teams cannot re-award that grant-in-aid to another player. In effect, a team's financial aid limit is reduced by the amount of countable aid awarded to the student-athlete who did not earn eligibility and was not retained. A contemporaneous penalty is not automatically applied when teams fall below the APR cut point; it is applied only when teams below that line do not retain an academically ineligible player.

There are exceptions available for student-athletes who have exhausted eligibility in the sport in which the aid was awarded. The exceptions are applicable to:

* A student-athlete who does not use all of his or her seasons of competition but exhausts his or her five-year clock.

* A partial or nonqualifer who fails to earn a fourth season of competition by graduating prior to the start of his or her fifth year, and therefore has exhausted eligibility.

* A fall sport student-athlete who concludes his or her competitive eligibility at the end of the fall term and does not return to the institution subsequent to the fall term.

* A student-athlete who concludes his or her competitive eligibility at the end of four years.

• 10 percent cap. To ensure that the contemporaneous penalties are rehabilitative in nature and not overly punitive, the Board of Directors approved a limit on the number of contemporaneous penalties that apply to a team in a given year 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 the headcount sport of Division I-A football, a team with an APR below 925 would be subject to a penalty of up to 10 percent of the maximum 85 scholarships, rounded up to the next whole number (in this case, a maximum penalty of nine scholarships).

• Historically based penalties. While contemporaneous penalties are designed to be rehabilitative in nature, the historically based penalties carry a more significant punitive hit for teams that the APR identifies as "chronic" under-performers. The Committee on Academic Performance will finalize details of the penalty structure over the next year. The penalties will be incremental in nature, beginning with a warning once teams fall below a to-be-identified APR cut score, and progressing to recruiting/financial aid restrictions, postseason bans and restricted membership status upon subsequent occasions.

• Graduation Success Rate (GSR). The GSR is an alternative graduation-rate methodology the NCAA will launch this spring. The new rate, which will supplement and not replace the federal methodology, credits institutions for transfers -- both incoming and outgoing -- as long as they are academically eligible. The new rate also accounts for midyear enrollees and will be calculated for every sport. Data collection on four cohorts (1995-96 through 1998-99) will be available in March, with data due from institutions by mid-May.