DALLAS -- The Division I Board of Directors has drawn its much-anticipated line in the sand in the newly adopted academic-reform structure under which athletics teams will be subject to contemporaneous penalties.

Meeting January 10 at the NCAA Convention, Board members agreed that teams whose Academic Progress Rate (APR) is below a score of 925 would be subject to contemporaneous penalties. Board members also agreed to "cap" the maximum contemporaneous penalty that would apply to a team in any given year at 10 percent of the financial aid team limit in that sport (for example, a maximum loss of two scholarships in men's and women's basketball, and nine in Division I-A football).

"These strong measures give us a good idea how to define institutional accountability for academic progress -- as well as to define what constitutes unacceptable performance," said Board Chair and University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway.

The action ends months of speculation about how strong of a message the Board intends to have the contemporaneous penalties send to member institutions. Contemporaneous penalties, which restrict an institution's ability to replace scholarships of student-athletes who leave their institutions and wouldn't have been academically eligible had they returned, are the most immediate in the reform package that relies on the APR to determine a real-time snapshot of every team's academic success. They will begin being applied next fall based on the combination of 2003-04 and 2004-05 APR data. Once a team's APR falls below the cut point, it is subject to a contemporaneous penalty when it loses a student-athlete who would have been academically ineligible.

Contemporaneous penalties initially were proposed by the Board to provide a more immediate behavior modification in the academic-reform structure before the more serious historically based penalties begin being applied once four years of APR data are collected. The Board has yet to determine the APR cut points for those penalties.

The recommendations for the cut point and the cap on contemporaneous penalties came from the Committee on Academic Performance (CAP), which met January 9 in Dallas. That group, chaired by University of Hartford President Walter Harrison, settled on an APR score of 925 (out of a possible 1,000) because it equated with an expected graduation rate of roughly 50 percent, which CAP members believe is a reasonable standard.

By selecting the 925 cut point and adding the cap on the number of contemporaneous penalties that can be applied at one time, CAP and Board members believe they reached a comfort level with a system that sends a swift and strong message to institutions to get their academic houses in order.

"I believe the package represents significant penalties," said Harrison, who also is a member of the Board. "The package is clear, understandable and includes meaningful penalties that we believe will modify behavior."

Using the 925 cut point, data from the 2003-04 APR indicate that 7.4 percent of all sports teams would be affected (concentrated primarily among football, men's basketball and baseball teams). More than half of all schools (51.2 percent) have at least one sports team that would have been subject if the penalty were currently in effect. The Board agreed last year, however, that the 2003-04 data would serve only as a warning. Those results will be distributed to the Division I membership in February so institutions can compare their teams in the aggregate and take corrective measures before the real penalties go into effect.

Level of punishment

Determining the impact that contemporaneous penalties have on institutions has been a topic of debate at the Board's past several meetings. In earlier discussions, some members favored a one-for-one contemporaneous penalty rather than what they believed to be the less punitive cap. Others, though, noted that the contemporaneous penalties are the "shot across the bow" that indicate when institutions are on the wrong academic path, and are not meant to be as harsh as the historically based penalties that are intended to identify the chronic under-performers and punish them accordingly through postseason bans and membership restrictions.

Board members agreed at this meeting, though, that the 10 percent cap is a stringent measure that still preserves the contemporaneous penalties as rehabilitative in nature. They also believe that setting the 925 APR cut score sends that message to a larger portion of the academic distribution.

NCAA President Myles Brand said the Board made the right decision.

"The CAP and Board have responded in terms of the academic performance expected of student-athletes," he said. "Their actions reinforce the idea that student-athletes are students first, and that they are expected to make progress toward a degree and to graduate.

"The rules the Board put in place support that mission."

Though the establishment of the cut point and cap largely complete the contemporaneous-penalty infrastructure, Board members still have some issues to resolve. First, Board members acknowledged that the APR correlates to the admittedly flawed federal graduation rate, which does not accurately account for transfer student-athletes. They noted, though, that the NCAA will begin collecting institutional data this spring to compose a Graduation Success Rate that will factor in those transfers and produce a more accurate -- and likely higher -- graduation rate.

While those rates might improve once the new and more accurate calculation is released next fall, Board members agreed they still want to train their academic-reform focus on the cohort identified by the 925 APR, which means they may have to adjust the cut score once the GSR is in place.

Board members also discussed how the contemporaneous penalties apply uniquely to football. Because football has both head-count limits and restrictions on initial counters, Board members asked the CAP to consider how teams subject to penalties in effect "restore" their roster in subsequent years (since no more than 25 initial counters can be signed in any one year).

The Board also discussed how institutional mission factors into the contemporaneous-penalty equation, particularly if a team's APR falls below the cut point but is at or above the institution's graduation rate. Board members, realizing that institutional mission is an important distinction when weighing academic outcomes, noted that the CAP's subcommittee on appeals will be developing some broad guidelines that could be considered as mitigation by the subcommittee in the appeals process.

"That approach provides the subcommittee with some flexibility to consider a range of factors, rather than administering mission considerations systematically," Harrison said. He added that such mitigating factors may include comparing a team's APR with the overall athletics program's APR, or a team's graduation success rate with that of the school's general student body.

Calculating the APR

The APR scores will be used as the established benchmark for purposes of establishing a cut score, and APR scores will, over time, become meaningful numbers to the membership and general public. However, at present, APR scores do not have significant meaning to policy-makers, and so for purposes of initial discussion, APR scores have been translated to graduation rates.

Raw APR scores are determined through a point system in which each team member earns one point for eligibility/graduation and one point for retention each term, the two key factors in determining the likelihood of graduation. A raw APR score of .925 translates to about a 50 percent federal graduation rate.

To simplify the calculation, the APR score for a team will be multiplied by 1,000. For example, if Institution X has an APR score of 885 (.885 raw APR score x 1,000), the team in question would be subject to contemporaneous penalties.

APR scores for quarter institutions will be converted to a metric that is comparable to that of semester institutions. That conversion is necessary because the term-by-term calculation of the APR increases quarter schools' APR in ways that are unrelated to academic performance.

The 10 percent cap

Maximum 10 percent

The above chart demonstrates the maximum possible contemporaneous penalties to be imposed on a team when a cap of 10 percent of a team's maximum financial aid team limit (rounded up to the next whole number for head-count sports) is applied.

Other highlights

Division I Board of Directors
January 10/Dallas

• Heard a presentation from the Division I Baseball Issues Committee on a concept to establish a uniform start date in baseball and move the championship back one week. Board members supported the uniform start date but suggested that the modifications to the length of the playing and practice season be accomplished through a reduction in the maximum number of contests rather than a date change.

• Asked the Management Council's governance subcommittee to address several structural issues and submit recommendations to the Board in April. Specific issues for the subcommittee to review include (1) the lack of Board authority to reconsider a proposal that has been defeated by the Management Council, (2) the lack of Board authority to initiate legislation, and (3) the role and purpose of the Council's January meeting during which it conducts an initial review of legislative proposals.