NOTIFICATION: If you have a student advisee who is being placed on probation, you will be cc’d on the official letter that is sent to the student. Please check your email. In this letter, students will be told to contact their faculty advisor. If your advisee does not reach out to you, please email them, and request a meeting.
ACADEMIC GOOD STANDING CRITERIA: Review the criteria for Academic Good Standing found here: https://catalog.tulane.edu/public-health-tropical-medicine/#academicpoliciestext under the heading Academic Standards. The course catalog is THE SOURCE for policies. We continue to clean up pages on the website with outdated/misinformation. If you find any of those pages, please let me know so we can correct or remove them.
ACADEMIC RECORD: Go to Gibson and pull up the student’s transcript and review it. You should have access to your advisees’ transcript. If you don’t, let me know.
STUDENT MEETING: Schedule a meeting with the student and do an initial assessment and prepare an academic improvement plan.
- Review the student’s academic record.
- Identify the areas where the student is underperforming (grades, GPA, other issues).
- Discuss contributing factors such as personal challenges, lack of understanding of the material, time management issues, etc…
- Define specific goals.
- Course grades
- If a student does not achieve the grade needed in a course, they need to retake the course within 12 months. If the course is SPHL 6050 or 6060, strongly encourage them to retake the course in the Fall or Spring semester (not summer). Why? Summer is 10-weeks vs 15-weeks. Students that fail the course in Fall or Spring struggle to retake the course in the summer.
- Students can repeat a course one time. f they fail the second time they will be dismissed from the program.
- Can a student take the course at another school and transfer it in? No, that is against our transfer credit policy
- Cumulative GPA – students need a 3.0 or higher to graduate.
- If the student GPA is under 3.0, make sure the student understands what GPA they need to attain with the remaining credit hours.
- Check out this link to calculate: https://gpacalculator.net/target-gpa-calculator/.
- Also note, if a student repeats a course, the lower of the 2 grades will be removed from the cumulative GPA calculation.
- Course grades
ACADEMIC IMPROVEMENT PLAN: Develop an Academic Improvement Plan with the student. This plan needs to be signed by the student and the faculty advisor and submitted via email to sphtmacademicaffairs@tulane.edu and sphtmadvising@tulane.edu within 2 weeks. (For the students that have just been placed on probation, the due date is Friday, January 26, 2024). ·
Attached is an Academic Improvement Plant Template for you to use. (We will be working on moving this form to Docuphase so it is easy to sign, but for now use the linked version. The Academic Improvement Plan requires short-term goals such as course(s) the student must repeat, GPA that must be achieved, and work that needs to be completed to return to good standing.
- Be specific on the steps the student must take to achieve their goals and set a clear timeline.
- Schedule regular check-ins with the student.
- Keep records of meetings with the student – documentation is important for future reference and accountability. This can be as simple as sending an email (to yourself and the student) after each meeting with a summary of what was discussed.
CONNECT WITH THE STUDENT SUCCESS ADVISOR (SSA): Each department has an assigned SSA who is a trained student affairs professional. Reach out to your SSA. Let them know how they can help you support your advisee. They will also be checking in with the students and will be using the Academic Improvement Plan that you create with the student to help support the student’s goals. The SSA can help you identify resources, such as counseling or tutoring services, for your student.
CONNECT WITH YOUR DEPARTMENT MANAGER: keep the program managers updated on students placed on probation. The more support we can offer our students the better. It takes a village!
