MSVU program gives students a second chance

Course designed to keep students in school

Dr. Joanne Mills created Mount Saint Vincent University’s Success Course in 1999 to help students improve their grades. Photo: Ezra Black

"You have something to write with there?" she asks.

For Dr. Joanne Mills, academic success is about basic skills - like remembering to bring a pen to an interview.

Mills, the counseling coordinator for Mount Saint Vincent University, developed a program called the Student Success Course in response to an increasing number of students being expelled for poor grades.

Any Mount student who is put on academic probation is automatically enrolled in the course. It is designed to give them the tools to restore their academic health.

In 1997 the university changed its academic probation policy. It was no longer based on the number of courses passed and failed, but on the strength of the student's grade-point average. The year after the change, expulsions due to poor grades increased 166 per cent.

"Before, a student could get five Ds and fly under the radar," says Mills. "But once we looked at GPA ... you throw one F in there and a couple of Ds and all of a sudden you've got a student in trouble."

At the time Mills was working as both an academic advisor and a student counselor. As counselor she would help students choose their majors; as an academic advisor, she was putting struggling students on academic probation and, at times, dismissing them from the university.

Discussions with colleagues led Mills to a realization: "We need to provide some kind of support ... or we're going to lose all these students."

In 1999 she was tasked to create a program that would stop the slide.

The result was the UNIV: 0001 Student Success Course, now in its eleventh year with 115 students enrolled. Students are graded but the course has no effect on their GPA. Class size is limited to 20 and students are taught applied study skills, motivation, career planning and stress management.

Most Canadian universities offer study-skills workshops, but Mills says the course takes a personalized approach, emphasizing motivation and commitment. Instructors are encouraged to share their own school experiences.

Studies conducted on course effectiveness

A yet-to-be-published study shows the course improves learning and motivational strategies, at least in the short term. The section on career planning is designed to improve student motivation.

"There is research that says the more defined your career goals the more successful you're going to be," says Mills.

In 2001, Mills did a follow-up study on a group of students who had completed the course and found the majority of students had climbed their way out of academic probation.

Lynn Cashen Basso, who teaches the course, says most students are in their first year. Students make their own mistakes, she says, but if basic skills were taught earlier these students might not be on academic probation in the first place.

"A lot of them were doing very well in high school," she says. "But university life is very different from the high school experience and that for a lot of students is a big adjustment."

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