
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 1, 1995                   TAG: 9507030143
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DOUG DOUGHTY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ACC OKS PARTIAL QUALIFIERS

WITH TOUGHER ACADEMIC standards being imposed by the NCAA, ACC faculty representatives decide to give a break to some student-athletes.

The ACC announced Friday that member schools will be allowed to accept as many as four ``partial qualifiers'' in response to more stringent eligibility standards imposed by the NCAA.

Faculty representatives decided in a conference call monitored by the ACC office to allow no more than one partial qualifier per sport and no more than two men or two women in one year.

``The biggest problem we're going to have is from sports writers who say, `You haven't had partial qualifiers, and now you're going to have partial qualifiers,''' said D.Alan Williams, Virginia's faculty representative.

``I don't think there's any question we're going to hear about this from people who don't know the difference between Proposition 48 and Proposition 16. But, this gives us a chance to look at the new standards without loading up.''

According to the old standards, eligibility was determined by a minimum score of 700 on the Scholastic Assessment Test or 17 on the American College Test, and a 2.0 grade-point average in a core curriculum of 11 college-preparatory courses.

A partial qualifier is a student-athlete who meets one of the standards but not the other.

The new standards (Proposition 16) increase the number of core courses to 13 and establish a sliding scale on which students will be required to have a 2.5 grade-point average if they have an 820 on the re-centered SAT, which is the equivalent of a 700 before the scoring system was changed.

``Most of [the faculty representatives] thought Proposition 16 was a rather severe upward shift,'' Williams said. ``Clearly, there will be student-athletes who don't qualify now who would have been eligible before.

``The partial qualifiers we accept will be on a very selective basis, and who knows if we will take any at all. I feel, among the 11 conferences playing Division I-A football, we've still got the strictest initial-eligibility requirements.''

Proposition 16 was scheduled to go into effect this year but was delayed in January at the NCAA convention.

``I don't see [Proposition] 16 getting tabled again this year,'' Williams said.

by CNB