When federal authorities announced charges against dozens of parents accused of paying big sums to get their children into prestigious colleges by cheating, they promised that the case would be a warning to others: If you try to use your wealth to lie and cheat your child’s way into college, you will get caught.

Six months later, as the first set of parents are to be sentenced in the nation’s largest-ever college admissions prosecution, it appears that the penalties may in some cases be lighter than prosecutors had hoped. For the first group of parents to be sentenced, which includes the actress Felicity Huffman, federal probation officials have said that the sentencing guidelines are zero to six months. That, legal experts said, opens up a significant possibility that these parents could get sentences of probation only — no jail time.

Ms. Huffman, who pleaded guilty to paying a consultant $15,000 to obtain an inflated score on her daughter’s SAT, is scheduled to be sentenced first, on Sept. 13. Prosecutors had said that they would recommend a sentence of four months in her case, and that the guidelines were four to 10 months.

If the judge ultimately chooses to impose no jail time in the cases of the first three parents to be sentenced, it would be a blow to prosecutors, who have said that wealthy parents ought to face significant penalties for a system of cheating that corrupted employees of elite universities and robbed hard-working students of admission slots. It could also have ramifications for the rest of the case, in which dozens more parents and coaches are still fighting charges.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney for the district of Massachusetts declined to comment for this story.

But at the sentencing hearing of the first person to be sentenced in the conspiracy — a former Stanford sailing coach, who was ultimately sentenced to only a day in jail, which was deemed already served, and six months of home confinement — the lead prosecutor in the case, Eric S. Rosen, told the judge that anything short of a prison sentence would send the wrong message.

“Imagine if you are a parent willing to pay a bribe to get your son or daughter into school,” Mr. Rosen said. “If you’re only going to be given probation, why not take that risk?”

It is possible that the parents will face harsher sentences. Prosecutors strongly disagree with the way federal probation officials have calculated some of the parents’ violations under federal sentencing guidelines, and the judge, Indira Talwani, has scheduled a hearing next week to air the dispute.

The crux of the disagreement boils down to whether the victims of the admissions fraud — which prosecutors say were testing companies and the universities to which the students applied — were financially harmed by the scheme. Prosecutors have said that they were, pointing to costs like money spent on internal investigations at the colleges, salaries paid to corrupt employees, and predicted declines in applications to schools with reputations tarnished by the scandal.

But probation officials have concluded that the testing companies and colleges suffered no financial loss. As a result, probation officials have said that the guidelines call for shorter sentences — and perhaps no jail time — even in the case of a parent who prosecutors had argued should receive 18 months.

Even if some parents end up getting only a few months of imprisonment, or probation, many will still have suffered serious consequences. They have lost work, seen their reputations damaged, and become public symbols of arrogance and greed. Some of their children have been dismissed from schools or rejected by them, and given the publicity the case has attracted, they may face steep odds in finding colleges that will accept them.

Despite this, if many of the parents end up being sentenced to probation, the prosecutors would be disappointed, said Robert Fisher, a former federal prosecutor and now a defense attorney at Nixon Peabody, who represents the Stanford sailing coach, John Vandemoer.

“That’s clearly not the result that they’re looking for,” he said. “They clearly want people to serve jail time.”

Daniel N. Marx, a defense attorney at Fick & Marx, said that if many parents get probation, “I think that really calls into question the judgment of the U.S. Attorney’s office in bringing the case and pursuing it so aggressively in the first place.”

“They got a lot of media attention for this,” he said, “but ultimately no one really lost any money. This was not a bank robbery. This was not a stock fraud. This was not the Enron of the university world.”

But Mimi Rocah, a former assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York and now a distinguished fellow in criminal justice at Pace University, said that while prosecutors would no doubt be unhappy if many people involved got probation, it would not take away from the case.

Regardless of the sentences ultimately handed out, she said, the case made an impact by revealing how a college admissions system supposedly based on merit had in fact been corrupted by money, more blatantly and explicitly than anyone had imagined.

“It was definitely an aggressive case, and unusual, unique use of the criminal statutes — and I think it just kind of shows that the statutes aren’t really designed for this conduct, exactly,” Ms. Rocah said. “But that doesn’t meant that they shouldn’t try.”

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