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Student Progress Evaluations

To: UT Knoxville Faculty
From: Susan D. Martin, Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Subject: Student Progress Evaluations

Student success is vitally important to the educational mission of UT Knoxville.  Research on student retention supports early academic warning/intervention programs as having a positive impact on student academic success. You can do a great deal to help UT Knoxville foster a culture of student success by providing evaluations of student progress at critical points in the term. Early Alert, UT's Web-based academic progress reporting system, is a critical piece of our student success initiatives.

Your participation in Early Alert will:

  • provide students with feedback concerning their overall, comprehensive performance in your course, in a way that individual grades do not always convey, with advice for their improvement;
  • provide advice for students' improvement beyond what an individual Blackboard site allows, (for example class attendance, completion of course assignments, conference with instructor);
  • provide student performance data to administrators/academic advisors/counselors who are monitoring/mentoring students enrolled in
    specific programs;  
  • provide the administrator/academic advisor/counselor the opportunity to help students access resources for academic success (tutoring, supplemental instruction, conference with instructor, time management and study skills) and reposition for academic success; and 
  • enable the university to identify and intervene with at-risk students at an earlier point via the holistic snapshot of a student's overall, comprehensive performance in all courses.

Next week many of you will receive a request to submit student academic progress information using the official "Early Alert" Web-based reporting system. I am writing today to urge you to participate in this important retention effort. We have asked all units on campus that encourage their students to obtain academic progress information to use the Early Alert System as the means to do so. These various units are not limited to, but do include the UT LEAD program for at-risk students, First Year Studies, The Thornton Athletics Student Life Center, ROTC, and various sororities and fraternities.

Please be advised that students for whom these requests are being made are not required to sign a waiver for release of this academic information to authorized University faculty and staff. The Early Alert Program falls under the "need to know" clause of FERPA, permitting the release of academic information by faculty/instructors to academic administrators, advisors, and counselors. This provision is outlined in the official University of Tennessee FERPA policy and guidelines for implementation. A signed statement by the student permitting release of information for Early Alert purposes IS NOT required.

I urge you to participate in the Early Alert Program. If you have questions concerning the Early Alert Program, please contact the Student Success Center at studentsuccess@tennessee.edu or visit the program's Web site at http://studentsuccess.utk.edu/ea.html

Posted: September 18, 2008