Satisfactory Progress Overview

In order for students to be eligible for federal financial aid programs, they must be making satisfactory academic progress towards a degree. Jenzabar provides two processes that enable schools to track and monitor student academic progress and to communicate this process to PowerFAIDS: Calculate Satisfactory Progress and Satisfactory Progress Details.

Calculate Satisfactory Progress begins by collecting relevant data on all students enrolled in the selected J1 year or year/term, whether or not they are aid recipients, and creates data rows for review by Satisfactory Progress Details. The data collected includes current division, degree, and major, as well as GPA and hours attempted and earned for term, year, and cumulative counts. For full review of all data populated into the PF_SAP_HIST table and how it is calculated, please review the SAP Source Data topic.

The data collected is based upon those detailed by the federal regulations for SAP which includes three basic components:

3. Maintaining a minimum academic pace towards earning a degree that is calculated in accordance with their maximum time frame

Collecting data from a wide array of registration data tables into a single table is intended to make it easier to write the rules for each satisfactory progress grouping. If your school’s policy requires additional data values or calculates some of the data Jenzabar does collect with additional or different conditions, then a stored procedure is needed to meet these needs.

After the required data is collected, then the process continues to evaluate the student’s progress according to the rules defined by each school for the three SAP rules based update definitions.

This definition is used to assign each student to an appropriate rule group. You may have an SAP policy for all Undergraduate students but a separate one for nursing majors. This is how you distinguish each group.

This definition calculates whether the student passes or fails your policy requirements. It is a strict look at your policy rule. You will need to define both the pass and the fail logic and be careful not to overlap or orphan students in that process. You must also remember to select students based upon their rule assignment.

This final definition now assigns the student’s final progress based upon whether they have passed or failed their rule’s policy in combination with their previous progress determination. For example, if a nursing major failed the nursing major policy requirements and her previous progress is NULL because this was her first semester attending, then you will likely assign her to either a Warning or Probationary status. If a non-nursing undergraduate passed the undergraduate policy requirements and his previous progress is Warning, then you will likely assign him to a Good status.