A method and apparatus for adaptively biasing a channel quality indicator (CQI) used for setting a configuration of communication between a transmitter and a receiver in a wireless communication system. The receiver sends a CQI and positive acknowledgement (ACK)/negative acknowledgement (NACK) messages to the transmitter. The ACK/NACK messages indicate the absence or presence of error, respectively, in a transmitted data packet. The CQI is derived from the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) and the ACK/NACK messages. The transmitter calculates the block error rate (BLER) of the transmitted data packets based upon the ACK/NACK messages sent from the receiver. The transmitter compares the BLER of the transmitted data packets to a target BLER and biases the CQI based on the comparison in order to achieve the target BLER.