(297) Impact of a New Early Tracking System on Students’ Academic Progression

Objective : Early intervention for students needing academic improvement is critical for student success. Furthermore, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education Standard 17 requires that the college develops, implement, and assess its policies and procedures related to student progression throughout the PharmD program. This study is aimed to discuss modifications in the Marshall B. Ketchum University College of Pharmacy (COP) tracking system and academic progression and describe the effectiveness of the updated system.

Methods: The COP modified its original tracking system and developed a new early warning system, "Individualized Plan for Academic Success System (IPASS)," to track students with academic difficulties in a given quarter. Stakeholders' input was solicited in the form of in-person faculty interviews and student surveys in the development of this new tracking system. The changes included sending warnings to course coordinators instead of the student advisors and tracking the IPASS system for each exam. Starting with the Academic Year (AY) 2021-2022 Fall Quarter, the COP Office of Academic Affairs started identifying students placed on IPASS in more than one course to implement additional interventions in collaboration with the Office of Student Affairs. The impact of this new system was assessed by correlating the number of initiated IPASS events with students' performance in a course.

Results: The IPASS was implemented 478 times, which resulted in 60-course failures for P1 to P3 students in didactic courses in the AYs 2021-22 and 2022-23. The results of our study indicated a course pass rate of 87.5% post-IPASS for all pharmacy students.

Conclusions: This study demonstrated the usefulness of a new early warning system that can identify at-risk students early in their academic progress so that the deficiencies can be remediated.