Cohort-Based Success Scores FAQ

Every Student starts with a score of 100 and if a rule reflecting a risk factor is true for a student, corresponding weight points for the rule are deducted.

These rules are based on the best practices that are informed by a large body of available research on the subject, as well as inputs from our partner schools - ranging from community colleges to large research Universities. 

The rules can be configured based upon several categories of data:

There is a Cohort called All Students that serves as a “catch-all” to ensure that every student will have a success score calculated. This Cohort is always last in priority order by default. For a full overview of how Cohort Based Success Scores work, review the article Cohort-based Success Scores Overview.

• One of the biggest limitations of other success scores is that most of these score all students with the same set of criteria. Different cohorts of students may require different criteria for scoring. For example, the scoring criteria for success should look very different for freshmen from the criteria for seniors. For freshmen you may want to look at their highschool grades, but for seniors you already have 3 years of their college grades and GPA. TargetX Cohort Based Success Scores enables you to score different cohorts with different sets of criteria.
• Also, most scores are usually opaque. When you look at a success score, it is often a number without any underlying details. For example, a student may have a GPA of 3.9 and still has a success score of 60 on scale of 100. When Advisors see something like this, they begin to doubt the score itself as they can not see why the score is low. Another problem with an opaque score is - what do you do with this number? How does it inform your student success efforts? TargetX Cohort Based Success Scores empowers advisors by providing drill-down risk factors behind a score so they can have more meaningful conversations with the students.

With TargetX Cohort Based Success Scores, you can:

• Create and manage up to 100 unique Cohorts in the TargetX Builder. Use different criteria for scoring cohorts based on your target populations, such as First Generation Students, Underserved Student Populations, and Adult Students.
• View a detailed breakdown of risk factors affecting a student’s score.
• Run Reports on Cohorts and Scores using any Report that includes the Contact object.

Cohort Based Success Scores is free for our Retention and Community College Suite clients at no additional cost. 

• Install the latest Retention package to access Cohort Based Success Scores.
• Install the latest Retention package or later to enable Success Scores in Student Success Center.
• Install minimum required or later Base package.

If a particular Student, or set of students, are not displaying a Cohort or Score, verify the following:

• Verify that the ALL Students cohort is Active
• Verify that the Student(s) without Scores have a Role which matches what you selected in the Batch Job Settings.
• Verify the Batch Job ran successfully:

1. Navigate to Setup and search for Apex Jobs.
2. Look for the following jobs:
   • SuccessScoreCalculateBatch
   • SuccessScoreAssignCohortBatch    
3. Verify that the Status is Completed and Batches Processed has a number greater than 0.

If you add the Success Score component to your Contact Layout, it will display the Cohort that was assigned to the Student along with their Success Score.