By Libby Sander

The annual report card for scholarship athletes was the best yet this year—but there's plenty of room for improvement.

This was the message that officials with the National Collegiate Athletic Association delivered Wednesday in announcing the association's latest report on academic-progress rates.

The annual analysis of the academic performance of Division I athletes, now in its sixth year, demonstrated marked improvement in several sports, including men's basketball and football. But the report also highlighted many challenges that remain, particularly at institutions where resources are strained and in sports that have long grappled with a variety of factors that impede academic success.

"We are moving forward, but quite frankly, we must remain vigilant," said James L. Isch, the NCAA's interim president, speaking on a conference call with reporters.

The academic-progress rate, which measures eligibility, retention rates, and graduation rates of each of the 6,400 or so teams in Division I, has become a key academic-management tool for athletics departments and university administrators alike, said Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford. "We've seen steady progress," said Mr. Harrison, who also chairs the NCAA's Division I Committee on Academic Performance. "I think that's wonderful, and it's a great indicator that coaches and administrators understand the goal of academic reform."

The NCAA introduced the academic-progress rate to gauge college athletes' performance in the classroom. Out of a total score of 1,000, a mark of 925 would, for example, correlate roughly to a 50-percent success rate in graduating players within six years. (The NCAA uses its own Graduation Success Rate, rather than the graduation-rate formula used by the federal government, to account for transfer students.)

Teams with academic-progress rates below 925 can lose scholarships, and scores below 900 can trigger more-severe sanctions, like restrictions on practice time and postseason play.

But not all teams that post low scores are penalized: This year, only 137 of the 428 teams with scores lower than 925 received some kind of sanction. Last year, by comparison, 177 teams received penalties, and two years ago, 213 teams did.

And of the 10 teams this year with scores low enough to draw the harshest penalty, a ban on postseason competition, only one—the men's basketball team at Portland State University, with a four-year average of 865—received it. The NCAA granted waivers to the other nine teams, which officials said had demonstrated a commitment to improving their athletes' academic performance.

Among elite men's basketball and football programs at major conferences, only a dozen or so posted scores lower than 925. In basketball, they included Auburn, Colorado, Georgia Tech, Indiana, Kansas State, Maryland, Purdue, Southern California, and Syracuse; in football, they were Colorado, Mississippi, and Washington State. Of those squads, only three—the teams at Syracuse and Colorado—received penalties of scholarship reductions.

NCAA officials emphasized, as they do every year, that the report is not meant to be a punishment. Instead, they said, it is designed to encourage institutions to take constructive steps in boosting their athletes' academic experience.

"The goal here... is improvement," Mr. Isch said, adding, "There is punishment when warranted."

Room for Improvement

NCAA officials were pleased on several fronts. The three sports that have been under their watchful eye since the report's inception continue to post higher marks every year. Football's average academic-progress rate for the four-year period of 2005-6 to 2008-9 is 944, up five points from last year; men's basketball, meanwhile, increased by seven points, to a score of 940. And women's sports continue to post very high academic-progress rates.

But it was the sport of baseball about which officials were most excited. In the wake of new policies meant to address the sport's high transfer rates and uneven academic loads, officials are now seeing some results: Baseball's average academic-progress rate jumped eight points since last year, to 954.

Mr. Harrison also credited the academic-progress rate with changing the tenor of conversations about academics among presidents, athletic directors, coaches, and athletes. At many institutions, coaches' employment contracts now include minimum requirements for academic-progress rates; later this year, the NCAA plans to release its first round of academic-progress rates for coaches.

But Mr. Harrison said the positive trends did not signal the end of the road.

Low-resourced institutions, which the NCAA defines as the colleges that rank in the bottom 10 percent of Division I in terms of spending per student, still encounter difficulties in improving the academic performance of their athletes, Mr. Harrison said. Teams at historically black colleges and universities, for instance, struggle every year to meet the NCAA's standards for academic progress: Several of those institutions have at least one team scoring below the cutoff this year, with some having as many as eight or 10 teams failing to meet the benchmark. The NCAA typically gives many of those programs a public warning rather than stiffer sanctions.

And basketball and football, despite the gradual improvement, still grapple with a host of challenges, including a tendency for players to arrive on campus ill-prepared for college-level classes and to take on lopsided academic loads to accommodate their sports' demanding schedules, officials said. But the recent improvement of baseball's academic track record could be replicated with similar sport-specific rules for basketball and baseball, Mr. Harrison said. The complete report is available at www.ncaa.org.