Students at Morgan State University are now preparing for finals. As the year comes to a close, students are ready to take on their last and final chance to ace their exams. But throughout the semester, Morgan has established a system called Starfish, to help professors keep their students on track.

Starfish is a student success company with more than 300 colleges and universities that is over 10 years old. Morgan started using Starfish in 2013 due to winning a grant of 100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is to help with academic advising and student support. To launch Starfish, the process took a whole year to prepare this program for faculty and students. Students are able to use this tool in Websis and banner. Starfish for students has been available since the spring semester of 2014. Thus far, Morgan has had four semesters of Starfish.

The purpose of Starfish is to help universities identify students who are in need of support and to find help in advising from faculty and staff. The feedback professors can give to their students can range from a simple “kudos” to a notice of concern. The purpose is keep students informed, so they will know how they have been doing in class, and it will not seem like they did not know all semester.

For students who are having a tough semester, the first flag they’ll receive will be a direct message from their professor to schedule a meeting. Then if a student has more flags in more than one course, a student success staff leader will reach out to the student and help them schedule a time to meet and discuss a success plan.

Starfish does work for students, “The office of Institutional Research does an independent analysis of Starfish every semester to see the progress done by students. It pulls all the data from Starfish to look at student flags and tracking items and compare that in correlation with midterm grades and final grades,” said Dr. Mfume, Director of Student Success and Retention at MSU.

Morgan’s retention rate is at 76% in its second year within 10 years due to graduation rates. Students can go into Starfish under Websis and click on their professor’s name and view their calendar to schedule an appointment through Starfish. Faculty must have it set-up first in order to do that.

A word of advice from Dr. Mfume to any student who has been struggling this semester and needs a boost of encouragement states that “For a student who has been struggling in a class or more this semester, is to never give up, even if the semester has been terrible up to Thanksgiving. Don’t give up, finals are getting ready to start, time to pull some all-nighters. Go to the library, get tutoring, because no matter how poorly a student has done, a strong final exam, paper, turning in late assignments, can change things around. Until then, don’t give up!”