The Student Achievement Measure (SAM)
The Student Achievement Measure (SAM) is an improved way to report undergraduate student progress and completion by including a greater proportion of 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, 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 better accounts for the success of these students.
For institutions of higher education, the SAM offers an innovative reporting tool that provides a more comprehensive overview of student outcomes and includes a greater number of students. For policymakers and the public, SAM provides a more complete picture of student progress on the path to a degree or certificate.
source: http://www.
Student Achievement Measure (SAM) Profile for Georgia Southern University
Note. The SAM profile uses data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) which may vary from our institutional census data based on point-in-time of cohorts. For this reason, the graduation rate displayed in the SAM profile for Georgia Southern (see link above) may differ slightly to rates reported elsewhere on the Office of Strategic Research and Analysis web (Fact Books, Common Data Set (CDS), IPEDS, etc).
Last updated: 1/21/2020