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Fifth Week Flags: Week of October 12 and Thereafter
Your first inkling that an advisee is not doing well may be an e-mail Fifth Week Flag. Faculty, instructors, or TAs send email flags as an early warning to individual freshmen whose work, by the end of the fifth week, is below a C level.
Fifth Week Flags Process
Copies of these flags are sent to the freshman advisors and to the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming (UAAP) as well. The UAAP will also forward a list of flagged student athletes to those athletic coaches and Housemasters who have been trained in how to help students respond to flags.
Flags are sent right after the fifth week, as freshmen have had several quizzes and problem sets so their performance can be reasonably gauged. At this point in the term, it is still early enough for students to take steps to improve their performance. Statistically, freshmen who get Fifth Week Flags and go for help are far more likely to pass the subject in which they were flagged than those who simply slog on by themselves.
Critical Fall Term Deadlines
For advisees who need to add or drop subjects, encourage them to make such changes well before these deadlines. See the Registrar's site for details of the Add/Drop process.
- Add Date: Friday, October 9. Add date is the last date on which students can add subjects they are attending but for which they are not officially registered. Your advisees are responsible for checking WebSIS to be sure they are correctly registered, but you should also be monitoring your advisees' statuses of registration.
- Drop Date: Wednesday, November 18.
If you and your advisee decide that dropping the problem subject is the best solution, make sure that the student actually drops the subject by filing an Add/Drop form by this date rather than just stopping attendance in the class. Doing the latter produces administrative problems for the instructor. Better to have the student make a clear decision.
Advising a flagged freshman
- It is important to encourage any flagged advisees to meet right away with their instructors or TAs to discuss strategies for improving academic performance.
- You can also directly contact the TA or faculty member for a clearer understanding of what help your advisee may need. See the list of Freshman Lecturers for instructor contact information.
- Dean Donna Friedman of the UAAP also follows up with an e-mail message to each flagged freshman, emphasizing the need to get help now and including a list of helpful resources.
- Try to meet right away with any flagged students to encourage them to engage resources. Suggest that the students meet with their Instructors or TAs to discuss strategies for improving academic performance. Find additional resources and websites on Helping Advisees Improve Performance.
- "Dropping down": Another option is for the student to switch from a more advanced version to the standard version of the subject, e.g., 8.012 to 8.01, 18.01A to 18.01. Note that students who wait until Add date to switch versions are at much higher risk for failing the subject.
- If an advisee receives two or more flags, talk with the freshman about a plan to improve in both subjects. If a student gets so far behind that performance in one subject is endangering success in the others, you may want to discuss well before Drop Date the option of dropping one class in order to ensure passing the other three subjects.
- A student who waits until Drop Date, in the 10th week of the term, to drop the class in which s/he's struggling, may find that s/he is now not only floundering in the subject in question but one or more other subjects may be in jeopardy. Therefore, it makes good sense to drop well before
Drop Date.
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