Quality Point Status

Accountability is a major concern for higher education officials in the US and beyond. There is increased pressure to retain and graduate students in order to satisfy key stakeholders such as board members and taxpayers. Students who fail academically comprise one population we can look to for improvement. This post will focus on a seldom-used measure to determine the status of undergraduate students who are in academic distress. The name of the measure is "quality point status." This measure is cited several times in higher eductaion literature as honor point deficiency (Schuster, 1971; Russell, 1982; Kinloch, Frost, & MacKay, 1993). For the purpose of this post, the measure has been renamed to reflect a negative, neutral, and positive nature. Negative quality point status reflects the number of quality points needed to restore the student’s grade point average to a 2.00. Prior to understanding quality point status, a brief description of the method for determining grade point average (GPA) is in order. A students GPA is determined by assigning a value to the letter grade earned in a course (e.g., A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, and F=0) and multiplying this value by the number of credits assigned to the course. This calculation determines the number of quality points awarded per course. Subsequently, the sum of the quality points....