How students respond to academic probation

For a wide variety of reasons, some first-year university students fail to perform to the expected standard. Many universities deal with these students by placing them on some form of academic probation - for example, the student on probation might be required to pass a certain proportion of their papers successfully, or they will be denied re-entry into their programme of study. The purpose of academic probation is to provide an incentive for students to increase their study effort, or to deal with whatever other issues are getting in the way of their academic success.

How do students respond to being placed on academic probation? That is the research question addressed in this 2018 article by Marcus Casey, Jeffrey Cline, Ben Ost, and Javaeira Qureshi (all University of Illinois at Chicago), published in the journal Economic Inquiry (ungated earlier version here). In regard to the US, they note that:

...most universities maintain standards that are sufficiently high that nearly 25% of U.S. undergraduates will be placed on academic probation at some point during their tenure...

That strikes me as fairly high, relative to my experience here in New Zealand. Perhaps we are a little more permissive with re-entry than the US? Moving on, Casey et al. use data from a large (about 17,000 students) urban public university, with a sample comprised of:

...nine cohorts of freshmen undergraduates who entered the university during the fall semester between 2004 and 2013...

In total, Casey et al. observe outcomes for over 29,000 students. Students at the university are placed on academic probation at the end of any term where their GPA falls below 2.0 (on the typical US grade scale). To be removed from probation, a student needs to raise their cumulative GPA above 2.0.

Casey et al. use a regression discontinuity research design, where they compare the outcomes of students just below the cutoff for academic probation, with students just above the cutoff. To avoid issues related to students with a GPA of exactly 2.0 (those students turn out to be meaningfully different from students on either side of the boundary), they exclude students at exactly 2.0 (in what is termed a 'donut' strategy). The outcome variables they investigate include four-year and six-year graduation rates, as well as a range of student course-taking behaviours in future terms.

Before we get to their results, it is worth thinking for a moment about what a student might do when placed on academic probation. If the student is keen on remaining a student, they will want to get off probation, raising their cumulative GPA back above 2.0. In theory, they could achieve this by working harder, spending less time partying or working for income. Alternatively, they could reduce their course workload, giving them more time to devote to their remaining courses. Or, they could choose their courses strategically, ensuring that they are taking more 'easy' courses that offer higher grades, or dropping out of courses where it becomes clear that they might 'achieve' a failing grade. It is these sorts of strategic course-taking behaviours that Casey et al. are looking for in their data. And that is what they find, with some added wrinkles:

Our main finding is that probation causes students to engage in a variety of strategic behaviors that help to increase GPA without increased effort. This strategic behavior, however, does not appear for all groups. In particular, underrepresented minorities - black and Hispanic students - show relatively little evidence of strategic behavior whereas probation causes non-minorities to attempt fewer credits, fewer higher level courses, and substantially increases the probability of withdrawing from a course... Course withdrawal is a particularly important dimension of strategic behavior because it allows students to avoid very low grades that would drag down their GPA substantially.

The heterogeneity here is important. Underrepresented minorities were less likely to undertake the strategic behaviours that would result in their coming out of academic probation than other students. It would have been interesting to see if the results were similar when comparing students who are first-in-family at university with other students. Casey et al. suggest that underrepresented minorities may be "less aware of institutional policies and supports". Students who have parents (or siblings) who have previously been to university have greater 'social capital', since their parents (or siblings) can advise them on how to negotiate their way through university successfully. A similar lack of social capital exists for underrepresented minorities (almost by definition, given that they are underrepresented). On the surface, the difference in strategic behaviours between underrepresented minorities and other students in response to academic probation might suggest that academic probation contributes to inequality in graduation outcomes between underrepresented minorities and others. However, that assumes that academic probation actually makes a difference to students' graduation rates, and yet Casey et al. find that:

Probation has little impact on 4- and 6-year graduation rates for any group, suggesting that students who drop out or are expelled as a result of academic probation may have eventually dropped out anyway.

Yikes. Is academic probation really just an exercise in institutional virtue signalling, with no real impact on student graduation outcomes at all? Fortunately, this is just one result from a single (albeit large and public) university in the US. However, it does suggest that we need to look closer at what sorts of activities are associated with academic probation. In the university that Casey et al. looked at:

Students placed on academic probation are also required to have an additional meeting with the academic advising office in the following term.

That seems like a minimalist approach to probation, and unlikely to really change any of the underlying drivers that resulted in the student being put on academic probation in the first place. Other universities take a much more holistic approach to ensuring student success. It would be interesting to repeat this study in a university with a more student-centred approach to academic probation. At such an institution, students probably would still respond to the academic probation incentive in strategic ways,. However, if a more student-centred academic probation does a better job of addressing the underlying drivers of academic under-performance, students might also persist beyond their academic probation period, and the graduation outcome may well be different in those cases.