d Bar 414). In addition, school administrators and college athletics representatives also argued against the rule because its requirements were so restrictive as to bar minority students from taking advantage of increased open-door admissions policies and federal financial aid programs for which they would have been eligible without the rule (Covell and Bar 414).
The 2.0 rule that took its place, however, demonstrated the clear need for requiring athletics officials to consider student-athletes' academic performance when choosing who to admit to their programs. The 2.0 rule, adopted in 1973, made all student-athletes who had graduated from high school with a 2.0 GPA in their last three semesters eligible for athletic aid, without reference to the content of the courses on which the GPA was based or to any test scores (Covell and Bar 414). But news reports during the 1980s told horror stories of student-athletes who graduated from college without even being able to read, or told of other student-athletes who were abandoned by schools once their athletic eligibility expired (Haworth A46-47). Thus, critics of the 2.0 rule argued that it did not protect student-athletes from exploitation, and academic administrators at the colleges were blamed for allowing such exploitation to occur.
The result, supported by college presidents, was Proposition 48. Proposition 48 reinstated a minimum standardized test score requirement combined with a specification of what were considered to be appropriate college preparatory courses (Covell and Bar 414). Specifically, Proposition 48 required incoming athletes to have earned at least a 2.0 grade-point average in 11 specific high-school subjects and to have scored at least 700 on the SAT. Derek Bok, then president of Harvard University, agreed with then American Council of Education (ACE) president Jack Peltason and former president of the University of Illinois, who stated that Proposition 48 wa...