Student Achievement Measure (SAM)
Student Achievement Measure (SAM)
The Student Achievement Measure (SAM) provides an improved way to report student progress and graduation by including a greater proportion of an institution’s undergraduate students as well as tracking students who enroll in multiple higher education institutions. Usual measures of student progress and completion, including government-led efforts, usually underreport student achievement because they do not account for an increasingly mobile student population.
Nationally, more than one in five students who complete a degree do so at an institution other than the one where they started, and 15 percent of students had previously attended college in at least one other state, according to a recent study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Yet the typical method for calculating graduation rates, as stipulated by federal legislation, counts only those students who enroll full-time and then start and finish at their first college or university. SAM provides an improved measure to better account for the success of these students.
