Shrinking the DFW rate

The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) last year committed $3.5 million over two-and-a-half years to scaling a promising academic-credit–recovery model across 10 additional campuses. Now data from the first round of that effort, from last summer and fall, shows that 77 percent of students who previously received grades of D or F or who withdrew from a course succeeded in their efforts to retake that course (the DFW rate). Prior to the intervention, course retake rates were at 55 percent, amounting to an increase of 22 percentage points in course retake success. Retention was also high, at 85 percent for students retained in the fall after completing their summer accelerator course.