SAM graduation rate increases

Lake Region State College recently completed its Student Achievement Measure (SAM) data collection.

The college’s most recent graduation rate calculated for the 2014 cohort with a 6-year time to complete is 64 percent. This is up from 62 percent from the 2013 cohort. 

In December 2013, Lake Region State College signed up to participate in the Student Achievement Measure (SAM). SAM is a web-based, voluntary reporting tool that enables LRSC to measure and show publicly the graduation rates of students who each year either go uncounted or are wrongly characterized as having dropped out of college under the federal graduation rate. 

Unlike the federal graduation rate, which only tracks full-time students who start and finish at LRSC, SAM also tracks the progress and completion of transfer students and part-time students. This provides a more thorough representation of the mobility of LRSC students. 

All students included in each cohort are tracked for six years, with the six‐year outcomes measures reported at the end of the sixth year (summer 2020). Outcomes are non‐duplicative and mutually exclusive; each student appears in only one of the following groups. Student are counted in the highest outcome category they are qualified for (e.g., if a student earned both a certificate and an Associate degree from LRSC with later transferring to another institution,