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Existing MIT Practices

The MIT early warning system for first year students is known as the Fifth Week Flag system, and is a notification sent to any first-year student after the fifth week of the term who is currently below a passing level grade in any of their courses. As an example, in 2012, 203 first year students received 171 flags with 16% students receiving more than one flag. The top four core subjects with the most flags were 3.091, 7.012, 8.01, and 8.01L. These four classes accounted for about 74% of the total flags given out (Kellison-Linn, 2012).

Students who are identified receive a detailed e-mail from the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming MIT (UAAP), identifying options for tutoring, attendance at review sessions, and suggestions to meet with 1) academic advisor (who is also notified), 2) staff from the UAAP, 3) Student Support Services (S³), 4) MIT Medical, 5) MIT Mental Health, 6) Office of Minority Education (an example e-mail can be found here).

A perspective of the Fifth Week Flag from The Tech (Faviero, B.B.F., 2011):

The flags are emails, CC’d to a student’s adviser and the UAAP. Most flags are specific to individual students, and can include observations by the instructor like, “I noticed you didn’t do well on the last exam,” or “you haven’t been to recitation lately”… Most flags also involve a follow-up from the UAAP with information on resources and suggestions on how to improve performance. Norman said that flags are intended to be something like, “Let’s pause. Where do you stand right now, and what do you need to do to be more successful?”

All flags are forwarded to housemasters and varsity coaches, and students with multiple flags get more attention from the UAAP. They also get an email on how students can get support, particularly when it comes to personal problems.

Each student with multiple flags is expected to develop a “recovery plan” with the help of their adviser and the associate dean for advising and academic programming. The UAAP also encourages these students to sign up for Seminar XL: Limited Edition — a not-for-credit version of Seminar XL — which matches 4–6 students with a TA for two 1.5-hour sessions every week to review material and do practice problems.

Programs of Note

Several commercial software vendors exist (Starfish Solutions, Pharos 360, and others) but seem to be used primarily by smaller colleges.

• Georgia State University: recently published on a ‘big data’ approach which “raised its graduation rates by 22 percentage points and, in the process, eliminated all achievement gaps based on students' race, ethnicity and income level” (US Department of Education, 2017) by identifying approximately 800 factors predictive of academic failure, and triggering 51,000 face-to-face meetings with student advisors during the first year of use. This was accomplished through the use of its GPS Advising System which used ten years of student data at GSU to create predictive analytics for each student.
• University of California at San Diego: has developed a ‘Time to Degree Early Warning System’. “The system draws on factors including students’ per quarter grade-point averages; how many credits they have accrued towards their major and minor; whether students have completed pre-requisites on time and if they have had to repeat any classes. It also factors in high school grades and SAT scores.” “The models vary based on which of the university’s six undergraduate colleges, 60 departments and 100 majors the student is enrolled in. Advisers receive a dashboard of how a student is performing across key indicators, along with a ranking from 0 and 10 that indicates the student’s likelihood of completing college within four years. As the tool is rolled out, advisers are trained in timely and effective ways to intervene.” (Freeling, 2016). An example of the UC early warning ‘dashboard’ can be found at here.

Overview | Examples | References | Printable PDF