A Compass for Success: A New Direction for Academic Support Programs

Abstract

The use of academic support programs (ASPs) has spread rapidly through law schools; today virtually all law schools have such programs. Although law schools have been experimenting with these programs for nearly 25 years, there still is little consensus regarding what type of program is the most effective.

In 2000, William Mitchell College of Law fundamentally changed its approach to academic support, moving from a voluntary to a mandatory program, from working with "non-traditional" to "at-risk" students, and coordinating the teaching of skills with one of the students' doctrinal courses. Using a quasi-experimental design, an evaluation of the program showed that students who participated earned higher grades than their counterparts in the matched control group from the last year prior to implementing the program.

Keywords: academic support, ASP, empirical study