The Early Alert™ Report is designed to offer colleges and universities important retention and grade improvement data, so more students will be successful during their first years of college. It is further designed to give the institution on-going and immediate data over the years that will act as the institution's most important retention tool.

Most retention studies are only occasionally conducted at high cost and reveal generalities about the institution and students which may or may not be extrapolated to student improvement. The Early Alert™ Report is based on data gathered from SMART GRADES.NET™ * and gives the institution and the student immediate and specific feedback and suggests interventions for greater success. These results are on-going and at low cost to the institution. Specifically, it allows the student and the institution to know what areas of learning aptitude are at risk and what to do about them. Moreover, it may identify students at the beginning of the year that are at the greatest risk of not returning the second year, so interventions may be applied.

The Early Alert™ Report is designed for entire freshman classes, FYE programs, special populations like educational opportunity, basic skills, and student learning objective programs in many departments.

The following are the nine important retention questions answered by the Early Alert™ Report:

  1. What were the number of students, gender and other demographics of the group?
  2. How did the students' total mean scores compare to the national norm?
  3. How did the means scores on each of the eight factors tested compare to the national norm group?
  4. What would a charted summary of these eight scores look like?
  5. What were your institution's three highest scores?
  6. What were your institution's three lowest scores and what are the possible interventions?
  7. What are the individual student profile scores and which ones need improvement?
  8. Which of your students are at the greatest risk of not returning to your college the second year?
  9. How does this year's analyses compare to last year's, related to the eight questions above.

If interested, please view a hypothetical Early Alert™ Report now. Please give us a call at (530) 269-3230 or email us at

* SMART GRADES.NET™ is based on twenty years of research in over 200 colleges and universities involving 65,000 students, and it has a correlation with college GPA of r.=.35-50.