The HOPE study commission has two assignments. One is to cut a few bucks to keep it solvent. But the other is just as vital: make it honest.

The scholarship, which requires a B average, goes to 56 percent of Georgia's high school graduates.

The B average is no indicator of above-average achievement. It's not an honest measure of what students have learned or how well they're prepared for college. In fact, says the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education, Ken Breeden, a larger percentage of the state's high school graduates don't qualify for automotive technology training than do qualify for HOPE scholarships to colleges and universities.

When students arrive unable to perform college-level work, despite the certification from local boards of education that they're entitled to scholarships, the university system must provide remedial education -- meaning that the public has paid twice for the same basic education, three times if you count scholarship as a separate outlay. Fully 86 percent of the HOPE scholars with SATs below 800, and 60 percent of those with SATs below 900, need remedial courses.

To call it a scholarship is dishonest, at least to the extent that it is awarded to scholars and nonscholars alike.

The immediate problem being addressed by the HOPE Scholarship Joint Study Commission is an anticipated shortfall in funding. Without action to curtail costs, the HOPE-related programs will be $869 million shy of promises by the time this year's class of eighth-graders reaches college in the fall of 2008. Various actions -- elimination of the $300 grant for books and payment of fees -- could bandage the problem, if implemennted next school year.

The money problem will get fixed. The more troubling problem is that HOPE has become a virtual entitlement that induces students, teachers and school officials to cut corners, to game the system by foisting off self-esteem grades and diplomas as academic achievement.

One proposal the commission is considering to fix the bar on grades does have merit. Requiring a 3.0 grade-point average would have disqualified 32 percent of the students who got HOPE scholarships. Of the B students who don't have a 3.0 grade-point average 80 percent lose them within the first year of college. Clearly, the scholarship should be limited to those who have a legitimate 3.0.

Ideally, because grades and course material are so varied, some additional standard is needed. At the moment, the best of those is the SAT. Requiring a 1000, even if it is phased in, would serve that purpose, at least until end-of-course tests are implemented.

Shelley Nickel, director of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which administers HOPE, offered one constructive solution, though it's likely to be shot down by the full commission. She proposed giving students who score above 1000 on the SAT a full year of college before they are reviewed to determine whether they keep the scholarship. For those who score below, review would come after the first semester.

Too bad the idea's not likely to prevail. The goal is solvency, yes. But perhaps more importantly, it is to encourage scholarship, to drive SAT scores up and to discourage students and school officials from gaming the system. It's not about money so much as changing behaviors and creating a system that's held to be honest by those who perform and those who don't.

"We must not reward mediocrity regardless of race," Garland Hunt of Roswell, a parent and president of the Network of Politically Active Christians, told the commission. "The stakes are too high. We must expect Georgia students, regardless of race, to meet the challenge of academic excellence. And likewise, we must not waiver on upholding a standard of academic excellence and rewarding those who achieve it."

So simple and true. And yet so politically difficult.

Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.