Instructors may use low-cost, light-touch strategies to help students achieve optimal effort in demanding upper-level courses. The authors of this study exploit an intervention that provides a series of personalized feedback emails to students about their relative performance, which is tied to approving messages or tips that encourage improvement.…

Among the traditional measures of student quality, class rank is widely described by admissions officers as the fuzziest. That is why some colleges no longer use it in their evaluations of applicants, while many others do not consider it very important. The measure once had greater appeal. For one thing, it had the whiff of fairness. Seeing how an…

This study examines student's perception of the campus racial climate and interactional diversity at selective undergraduate liberal arts institutions through an examination of data collected in the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Student responses are selected from institutions identified as members of a specified group of…