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Educational Effectiveness Review APPENDIX B2 ANALYSIS OF SUPPORT PROGRAM EFFECTIVENESSThe analysis of support program effectiveness in Section B is based upon a study of all first-time freshmen entering during the fall terms of 1995-2001. That sample included 11,592 students. The sample was altered to exclude the 360 non-residents, 217 who were neither exempt from nor had taken the required Entry Level Math or English Placement Test, and 145 students with no record of their high school grade point average. The data presented is based upon the resulting set of 10,870 students. The composition of each cohort and the number of participants in each of the included program is shown in Table 1: Table 1. Count of students in analyzed database by cohort and program
The “expected” performance levels indicated in Section B are computed as follows: all students are categorized by five parameters: Admission Basis (regular or special); remedial status (needed or not needed); gender; ethnicity (African-American; Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, White, or Other); initial major (four groupings based upon average persistence in those majors); and a composite of high school GPA and SAT with GPA the dominant feature – again five categories. This gives 800 distinct categories. For each category a particular success ratio is computed as the percent of all students in the category who had that success. For each non-empty category this percentage is multiplied times the number of students in that group who are in the support group under consideration and the results are then summed over the categories. This is interpreted as the number from that support group who would have had that success in the absence of the support. |