Measuring a student’s academic progress is essential to ensure they are benefitting from the educational program in which they are enrolled. Failure to earn passing grades or complete courses on a schedule to earn a degree are far more than a financial aid issue. Satisfactory academic progress standards support the student’s best interest and give institutions some flexibility to determine the best way to do so. Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s review the basics…
- Your Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) standards should be part of your policy and procedure manual. Over time, your practices may change and when they do, your policy needs to be updated too.
- Your SAP policy for financial aid recipients needs to be at least as strict as that for non-recipients in the same program.
- Your policy needs to include both a qualitative and a quantitative measure. An example of a qualitative measure would be a grade point average, while an example of a quantitative measure would be the number of credits successfully completed versus those attempted. Nonterm credit, subscription-based, and clock-hour programs are exempt from the quantitative measurement.
- All periods of enrollment, including those during which the student does not receive Title IV financial aid, need to be factored into the assessment.
- Your policy applies to all Title IV programs — a student can’t be making SAP to receive a Pell Grant but not making it for a Stafford loan.
- You must evaluate SAP at the end of each payment period for programs less than a year in length and at least annually for longer programs.
- For undergraduate programs that are longer than two years, the qualitative standard at the end of the second year is at least a ‘C’ or its equivalent or academic standing consistent with your institution’s graduation requirements.
Let’s take a closer look at the qualitative measure. For most institutions it will be entirely based on grade point average. However, where students may do remedial work or take courses on a pass/fail basis, it gets a little more complicated. Remedial work must be factored into the qualitative assessment. If those courses are graded, you can include them in the GPA calculation. If not, you must develop another way to assess whether students are successfully completing these courses.
Pass/fail courses are another challenge. When pass/fail courses do not make up a large percentage of the courses attended, you can choose to exclude them from the qualitative measure; however, when students take mostly or all pass/fail courses, you need to have a way to assess successful completion.
Moving on to the quantitative measure which exists to determine whether students are on track to graduate within the maximum timeframe allowed. The timeframe required for undergraduate students in a credit hour program is 150% of the published length either in credit hours or calendar time. It is your institution’s option which to use. If you have programs in which students switch between full and part-time attendance, the credit hour assessment will give them a better chance of on-time completion since the calendar time doesn’t account for these changes in status. For graduate students, the institution determines the maximum timeframe allowed and as with undergraduate programs, there is a choice between a credit hour standard and a calendar time standard.
The pace of completion can be calculated in one of two ways:
- by dividing the total number of hours the student has successfully completed by the total number they have attempted; or
- by determining the number of hours that the student should have completed by the evaluation point to complete the program within the maximum timeframe.
Pass/fail courses must be included in the quantitative assessment regardless of how prevalent they are on campus. However, it is your option whether to include remedial work.
Your policy must specify how your assessment is affected by transfer courses, incomplete course, and ‘W’ grades. Only transfer courses that apply to the student’s program/major must be considered for both measures; however, you may choose to include all instead. Additionally, it is your choice whether to include courses at your institution that, because the student changed majors, are no longer applicable to their program/major.
Treatment of new or conflicting information must be outlined in your policy. While you are not required to check or re-calculate eligibility in between the formal evaluation periods, you may choose to do so. There are limitations on when you may disburse financial aid for a student that becomes eligible after a recalculation, and they vary by award type.
- For Pell and Teach grants, you may only disburse funds during the payment period immediately following the SAP evaluation affected by the change.
- For all other Title IV aid, you may only disburse funds during the academic year in which the evaluation takes place or if the evaluation is at the end of the academic year, during the academic year that follows the evaluation.
Institutions have a great deal of flexibility for how they work with students who are not making SAP, but ultimately all of the choices must create a path for the student to return to good standing.
- Financial aid warning – when a student is not making SAP after the evaluation period, you may place the student in a Financial Aid Warning status for one semester. The student does not need to submit a formal appeal to be placed in this status and if making SAP at the end of that semester, they are returned to good standing and continued to have financial aid eligibility.
- Appeals and probationary periods – you may implement an appeal process and allow students approved based on appeal to receive financial aid for a probationary period while working to return to good standing. This makes sense for students who had a ‘bad semester’ due to personal or health issues that are now in the past.
- Academic plan – for students being allowed to receive aid during a probationary period who will not, based on the cause of their academic issues, be able to return to good standing after one payment period, you may implement an academic plan and continue to award financial aid as long as the student is meeting the requirements of the plan.
When creating your SAP policy for financial aid, you must factor the institutional policy as well. For example, for financial aid purposes, your policy might allow a student to receive financial aid for a probationary period, but what if their academic standing results in suspension from your institution? You may want to use academic plans to extend financial aid eligibility for students needing more time to return to good standing, but who on your campus can and will create the plan? Ensuring your financial aid policy is aligned with your institution’s academic policy will help to avoid situations in which students don’t have a path to return to good standing. Creating this alignment requires partnering with your colleagues who are creating academic policies for your institution.
In summary, you have many choices for administering your SAP policy. Policy is the key word here. Where there is a choice, or it is up to the institution to define a standard, that choice and definition must be documented and applied consistently to all students and all types of Title IV aid. If it’s been a while since you reviewed your policy or if you never had a formal one, now is time to make sure it is serving your students and your institution. And again, your policy should align with the overall academic policy of your institution.
Whether documenting your SAP policy or reviewing students during the evaluation period, the Higher Education Assistance Group has resources to help you. Email info@heag.us and let us know how we can be of service.