Remediation's Role in Graduate Programs
Remediation involves the graduate school identifying students who are at risk of failing to meet the school's academic, behavioral, or professional expectations, for extra training. Graduate schools use remediation to help students, enhance their retention figures, and improve their bottom lines, but also to document and defend their corrective efforts when dismissing underperforming students. If you face your graduate school's opportunity, prospect, or demand to seek or accept remediation to reduce your risk of dismissal, then retain national academic attorney Joseph D. Lento to advise and represent you.
Remediation's Benefits in Graduate Programs
Graduate students are likely familiar with remediation, even if they haven't participated directly in a remedial program. As a recent graduate-programs article for educators on common forms of remediation explained, remedial programs differentiate instruction to meet individual students' peculiar needs. They also gradually guide underperforming students from directed learning to self-directed learning, weaning those students from remedial support. Remediation also groups students having similar needs and pairs students having special remedial needs with mentors who can meet them. Remediation also tiers and bridges assignments so that underperforming students can acquire subsidiary knowledge and skills to assemble into a complete performance. Remediation can also identify learning disabilities and help shape responsive services and accommodations.
Remediation's Risk in Graduate Programs
Graduate school remediation, though, isn't a bed of roses. In a perfect world, remediation would simply supply underperforming students with the additional instruction necessary for the student to perform. But graduate schools may not be skilled in meeting those individual student needs. They may instead expect to dismiss certain numbers and percentages of underperforming students, using remediation offers instead to ensure that the school appears fair and responsible, rather than to genuinely help the student. Remediation can also label and track a graduate student away from success and toward mediocrity or failure. National academic attorney Joseph Lento helps graduate students nationwide ensure that their remediation programs provide the opportunities, resources, and services that the student needs. He also helps those students document benchmarks by which the student can prove having met the school's standards at remediation's conclusion.
Unwarranted Remediation as a Genuine Risk
Graduate school programs are also not always especially skilled at assessing their students' true capabilities and performance. Graduate school professors and administrators make mistakes in evaluating student performance. They can also score and grade subjectively, without valid and reliable test instruments. They can also exhibit unfortunate biases that disadvantage students who are performing to the school's standards, instead erroneously marking them down below their actual performance and thus requiring remediation. In a perfect world, remediation would be no mark against a student, just another opportunity to confirm learning. But in the competitive job market that many graduate students face, any mark, including a record of remediation, can disqualify some students for preferred jobs, internships, residencies, and other career stepping stones.
Don't let your graduate school put you in that position of having to accept unnecessary and unwarranted remediation. National academic attorney Joseph Lento helps graduate students evaluate remediation offers, demands, and requests, discern when those requests are unwarranted, and turn back those requests or negotiate appropriate alternatives that leave no negative record. You may have extenuating circumstances for what looked like sub-standard graduate school performance, when you were perfectly capable of performing. You may have a sound explanation that, when presented in the right way with national academic attorney Joseph Lento's skilled advocacy and strong reputation, your graduate school will accept so that you avoid remediation, its distraction, and its potential for a mark against your strong academic record.
Graduate Student Remediation Goals
Graduate student remediation goals differ depending on whether the student's issue is academic, behavioral, or professional. The goal of academic remediation is to raise the graduate student's grade-point average above the school's minimum, help the graduate student pass rather than fail a required course, meet the required minimum score on cumulative, board, or other benchmark exams, or perform in clinical settings to the field's standards.
The goal of behavioral remediation is to conform the student's conduct to the graduate school's accepted behaviors and norms, as the graduate school's code and college or university code require to preserve and enhance the academic setting. Get the student to act like a graduate student, in other words. The goal of professional remediation is to get the student to act as a professional in that field would act in professional and related settings, as defined in national professionalism code and state licensing or certification body codes that the graduate school adopts and incorporates. Get the student, in other words, to do as professionals in that field do, and to avoid doing as professionals in that field avoid doing.
Graduate Student Remediation Methods
Graduate student remediation methods also differ along the same spectrum of academic, behavioral, or professional issues. Academic remediation methods focus on identifying substandard performance early so that the graduate school can supply the underperforming student with remedial assignments, tutoring, programs, practice, and other extra, focused academic resources. Professors, academic support professionals, teaching assistants, and tutors implement academic remediation.
Behavioral remediation typically involves intervention, psychological or other mental-health assessment, counseling, education, training, seminars, and even service activities, acts of contrition, and restitution, where the behavioral issue harmed others. Student affairs deans, counselors, psychologists, addiction specialists, and other mental and behavioral health professionals typically design, approve, and implement remediation addressing behavioral issues.
Professionalism remediation typically involves courses or assignments in the profession's conduct code and ethics rules and principles, introspective papers, written contracts, oaths, or commitments to the profession's guiding principles, interviews of leaders and exemplars in the profession, and studies of influential figures. If the unprofessional conduct harmed others, then professionalism remediation may also involve apologies, service, restitution, or other acts of remedy and restitution. Professionalism directors and professional mentors implement remediation addressing professionalism issues.
Why Accept Graduate School Remediation
Graduate school remediation can be a student's only or best opportunity for avoiding dismissal. In its best form, remediation enables the graduate student to continue studies on the same schedule and with the same peers as the student entered graduate school. Remediation need not delay graduation. Remediation terms, conditions, and agreements can help the graduate student avoid dropping or repeating courses, probation, and suspension, thus preserving financial aid and scholarships. Remediation can also keep the school from reprimanding the student, entering negative marks on the student's transcript, or disqualifying the student from desired clinics, honors, and internships. Graduate students have good reason to accept remediation, the greatest of which is to avoid dismissal and all its many impacts.
Effective Graduate School Remediation
Remediation, though, is not a magic wand. Effective remediation requires several terms and conditions. Remediation must take place early enough, in sync with the graduate program. Delaying remediation can be as bad as ignoring it, when the delays cause the student's deficits to snowball into an unrecoverable situation. Whatever the graduate school offers for remediation must also be something that the student can actually accomplish. Remediation offers that the student cannot access for lack of time, skill, money, or other reasons are worse than useless, making it appear as if the student has no interest. The student and school should also be able to observe and document remediation gains. Subjective evaluations of remediation's failure or success can undermine remediation's value. Graduate schools must also offer with remediation the facilities, equipment, personnel, and other resources that the remediation requires. Empty remediation offers that the graduate school is not ready to fulfill are worthless.
Retain Premier Representation
Graduate students tend not to be experts in designing, evaluating, and resourcing remedial education. Graduate students may not know when a school's offer of remediation is genuinely helpful or worthless. They may not know the criteria for evaluating remediation offers or have the negotiating skills to obtain better offers. National academic attorney Joseph D. Lento has those skills and that experience. Attorney Lento has helped countless graduation students nationwide obtain meaningful remediation opportunities to avoid dismissal.
Remediation terms can be complex and subtle. Graduate schools and their officials can have hidden agendas, causing them to disguise remediation conditions and miss opportunities for better plans and greater resources. Retain national academic attorney Joseph Lento and the Lento Law Firm not only to negotiate effective remediation but also to document the negotiated agreement in a way that makes it reliable. Let attorney Lento's premier representation help you get back on track in graduate school through remediation. Retain attorney Lento today by calling 888.535.3686 or going online.
