For years, savvy college students have been working the system to hang on to HOPE even when their grades were falling below the required B average.

But if the Legislature approves the HOPE study commission's recommendation to check GPAs more often, it will get a lot tougher for students to stretch out their eligibility.

Under the recommendation, HOPE scholars' grades will be checked at the end of the spring semester to see if they've maintained the B average needed to keep the scholarship.

That's a change from the current system, which checks grades after 30 credit hours -- which should be a typical student's full-time course load for a year. But many students who suspect they won't be able to keep their grades up have learned to trim their schedule to about 24 credit hours, meaning they stay eligible at least through their sophomore year.

The early check means students with low grades will lose the scholarship sooner.

"This will have a profound impact on student behavior," predicted Michael Vollmer, president of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and a member of the commission. "We are going to have students taking higher [course] loads, and that is going to save the program a considerable amount of money."

Ronald Henry, Georgia State University provost, said the added checks should make a difference.

"This will make the system fairer to students and hopefully encourage more students to take a good course load," he said. "We've seen that some have gamed the system and I think this will help combat that."

Terrell Mitchell, director of admissions at Macon State College, said many of his students had the HOPE requirements down to a science.

"We'd see students taking [up to] 29 hours to avoid the checkpoint in their first year," he said. "They learned how to stretch it out."

That kind of creative academic wrangling shouldn't be tolerated, said Justin Wilbanks, a freshman at Georgia Southern University currently receiving HOPE.

"If you get the HOPE scholarship, you should be a good student," Wilbanks said. "People shouldn't be able to cheat the system."

Wilbanks said he's unfazed by the proposed change, which could go into effect as early as next year.

"They're definitely not unreasonable," he said.

University of Georgia senior Michelle Connally said adding yearly checks to HOPE should weed out students who refuse to work hard for their grades.

Connally, a psychology major from Marietta, said she has always taken a full course load.

"Taking 15 hours a semester isn't that hard," she said. "If you're going to try to go around the rules, you should get caught."

State university administrators have long worried about students' extended college careers because funding from the state is based in part on credit hours. UGA President Michael Adams has said the university will lose $6 million to $10 million a year unless students take more classes.

Del Dunn, UGA's vice president for instruction and associate provost, said he supports the added checks but questions whether the change will motivate students to take full loads.

"It seems it would save HOPE money because some students would lose eligibility sooner," he said. ""But if there are still checkpoints at 30, 60 and 90 hours, some students still would not have incentive to take a full load."