Failed Warnings: Evaluating the Impact of Academic Probation Warning Letters on Student Achievement

Academic probation is a nearly universal but underresearched policy practiced at most postsecondary institutions.

To evaluate the impact of probation warning letters on students' academic performance.

Employing the inferentially strong regression discontinuity design, we evaluated the impact of two versions of warning letters (U.S. mail and email), noting their impact on next semester grades.

Probation and nonprobation students at a large, Midwestern college enrolled during two, successive fall-winter semester pairs (n > 17,000, for each pair).

Fall and winter grade point averages (GPAs) were identified for each individual student in the study sample.

Using both parametric and nonparametric analyses, we found that neither delivery method, paper or electronic, had a consistent, significant impact on subsequent GPA or odds of a GPA ≥ 2.0 during the next semester. Four of the eight measures of effect for GPA were small and positive (0.02-0.15; one significant positive outcome), and four were negative (-0.02 to -0.08; one significant negative result). A separate set of analyses that excluded students who took a single course led to further inconsistency in results. Supplementary analyses that excluded students scoring far from the cut-point yielded results consistent with a no-difference conclusion. Our findings also indicated that, after being placed on probation, only a small percentage of students were able to avoid movement to the next stage of academic sanction.

Warning letters notifying students of probation status, lacking a staff-focused intervention, had little impact on academic performance.