The top governing board of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I voted on Thursday to approve a series of penalties for sports teams whose players do not keep up in the classroom. The board also moved up the effective date of some of the penalties, meaning that teams with academic casualties could lose scholarships starting in 2005 and could be banned from championships in 2008.

"We're starting immediately to make reforms real, and moving them up a year in terms of full implementation," said Robert Hemenway, chairman of the Division I Board of Directors and chancellor of the University of Kansas.

Starting this fall, every Division I institution will receive a report showing a new graduation rate for each of its teams. The rate, which is meant to be more accurate than the rate mandated by the Student Right to Know Act of 1990, will count as graduates not only athletes who enter college as freshmen and leave with degrees within six years, but also athletes who transfer in and earn degrees and those who leave college in good academic standing.

A new NCAA committee -- led by Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford -- will then designate a minimum acceptable graduation rate. If a team's rate falls below the minimum and an athlete then flunks out during the 2004-5 academic year, the team will lose a scholarship for one year.

At the same time, the committee will examine how many athletes on each of the 6,000 Division I teams are meeting the NCAA's academic-progress standards, which require players to complete roughly 20 percent of their degree requirements each year to remain eligible for sports. It will establish minimum acceptable rates for each sport, as well as an overall minimum acceptable rate.

Beginning in 2006-7, teams that fail to meet the minimums for two years out of three will lose additional scholarships. Teams that fail for three years out of seven will be banned from championship events.

Mr. Hemenway said that athletes who transferred to Division I colleges from junior colleges would be subject to the same academic requirements, and thus would have a difficult time staying eligible unless all their junior-college credits were acceptable to the NCAA institution.

"Any student-athlete entering a community college with the thought of transferring is going to have to recognize that they have to meet these standards, too," said Mr. Hemenway, whose football team at Kansas has a number of former junior-college players on its roster. "We're expecting that students are going to get the advising they need in order to transfer."

The new standards drew an immediate endorsement from a faculty group that has consulted with the NCAA on cleaning up college sports.

"These reforms can better focus schools and their athletics programs on the academic needs and goals of athletes, but only if faculty and administrators at each school accept accountability for ensuring that the standards are honestly met," said a statement from the group, the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. "The NCAA has played a leadership role by adopting these policies; now it's up to everyone involved in education to translate them into campus cultures that support athletics as a complement to academics."

The Division I board also rescinded a rule that limited basketball teams to recruiting five players in any given year and no more than eight in any two-year period. Myles Brand, the NCAA's president, said the new academic standards had made the rule redundant.

Finally, the board put off controversial standards that would kick colleges out of Division I-A if their football teams failed to draw sufficient crowds and meet other requirements. The standards were due to take effect this fall, but colleges in danger of failing to meet the minimums have been lobbying to get them rescinded.

The board meets again in August. It will then vote on new restrictions on recruiting visits, particularly for football. Recruiting in the sport has come under intense scrutiny because of a continuing scandal at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where female students have accused football recruits of sexual assault.