The Office of Advising and Academic Services at California State University, San Bernardino serves various undergraduate student populations, including students on Academic Probation. Academic Probation for undergraduate students is defined as any student whose institutional and/or cumulative GPA falls below a 2.0. There were a total of 3,548 undergraduate students who were placed on academic probation over the past year (the Winter 2019 quarter through the Fall 2019 quarter), averaging 1,126 students per term (excluding Summer term).

Once probation students are identified at the end of each term, a registration hold is placed on each of their accounts. This hold is not removed until the student attends a 30-minute appointment with an academic advisor. Traditionally, a paper Administrative Contract was completed with a probation student during their advising appointment. When using paper contracts, advisors would manually write the student’s name, ID number, major, class level, GPAs, and units earned as well as a success plan to help the student increase their GPA. Advisors would also run a transcript report for the student and review each term to see if there were any repeat courses taken that are eligible for grade forgiveness. Lastly, advisors were responsible for manually removing the student’s registration hold and updating their term history to indicate that an Administrative Contract was signed. Once the appointment was completed, the students would receive a carbon copy of the contract.

This paper process allowed a lot of opportunity for human error. Manually writing a student’s information onto a contract leads to misspellings of names and incorrect ID numbers, which can make it difficult to properly log or track these students. In addition, monthly audits of probation appointments found that there were roughly 10 registration holds a month that were not removed from student accounts when they should have been. This mistake can delay students from enrolling in the classes they need to graduate, which can potentially delay their graduation. In addition, there were about 30 instances per month in which a student’s term history was not updated properly to show that a contract was signed. Oftentimes, students would also lose their copy of the paper contract and ask for another. While the paper process was effective and checks and balances were created to catch such errors, it was not very efficient.

The Office of Advising and Academic Services received grant funding to convert the paper process for Academic Probation to a smart, electronic process in Oracle/PeopleSoft. Over the course of six months, a functional team of staff members within the office worked with a technical team to create the electronic Administrative Contract for probation students. With the new electronic process, advisors simply enter the probation student’s ID number and the Administrative Contract auto-populates the student’s name, major, class level, GPAs, and units earned. A transcript button was built into the electronic contract so advisors no longer need to open new windows to manually run transcript reports for each student they meet with. Another button was built into the contract that displays all repeat courses a student has taken that are eligible for grade forgiveness, saving the advisor some time from having to manually review a student’s contract to find these courses. The minute an electronic Administrative Contract is completed and processed by an advisor, the student’s registration hold and term history are automatically updated and the student receives an email containing a PDF copy of the contract with working links to resources that may be beneficial.

Our office officially began using the electronic Administrative Contract as of December 16, 2019. To date, over 500 probation contracts have been processed. The results of using the electronic contract were very favorable and nearly eliminated all human error. Since going live, there has only been a 1% error rate, which was due to contracts being previewed but not fully processed. Ultimately, both advisors and students have expressed their satisfaction with the new digital process, the simplicity of its use, and its efficiency.