JUDGE SHOOTS DOWN PROPOSITION 16

PHILADELPHIA -- A federal judge ruled Monday that the NCAA may not use a minimum test score to eliminate student-athletes from eligibility to play college sports because the practice is unfair to blacks.

District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter cited the National Collegiate Athletic Association's own research showing that the practice harmed black students' chances of being declared academically eligible. He said there were other methods available to reach the goal of higher graduation rates that would be fairer to blacks.

The NCAA had required that incoming freshmen have a minimum score of 820 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, no matter how high their high school grades were, in order to participate in college sports.

Four black student-athletes who were denied eligibility to take part in college sports challenged the rule, which is commonly known as Proposition 16. An NCAA spokeswoman said the association had no comment on the ruling Monday.

"Low-income white student-athletes will also benefit because the rule has had a disparate impact on them as well," said the plaintiffs' lead counsel, Andre Dennis of the Philadelphia firm of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young.

"The court was focusing on the lack of a rational basis for selecting that particular score," said Dennis' co-counsel, Adele P. Kimmel, a staff lawyer with Trail Lawyers for Public Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. She described the SAT cutoff figure as arbitrary.

"Our lawsuit never said they couldn't consider SAT scores at all," Kimmel said.

She said NCAA staff researchers had recommended a "sliding scale," in which test scores and grade-point averages in core academic courses would be given equal weight. That practice, she said, would achieve the NCAA's goal of raising graduation rates and would allow more blacks to be academically eligible.

"The NCAA has ignored that, we think, in part because of a public relations problem," Kimmel said. "They can say, 'We're raising standards."'

She said the NCAA surveyed its member schools last year, and a majority of them decided to reject the NCAA staff's proposed sliding scale and keep the Proposition 16 rule.

In addition to ruling on test scores, the judge decided that the plaintiffs could sue the NCAA under the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to rule on that question last month, but Buckwalter noted that the plaintiffs' lawyers in this case had presented a lot of information not given to the Supreme Court.