What’s Next After a D/F/W Grade? Community College Students’ Online Course-Taking and Reenrollment Outcomes

ABSTRACT

Community college students’ success in required gateway courses plays a key role in their academic progress toward credential completion. Focusing on students who earned a D, F, or W grade in their first attempt at a required gateway course, this study investigated if students’ initial attempt course modality is related to their later choice to reenroll, reenrollment modality, and success in the subsequent attempt. We followed 2,673 first course attempts with a D/F/W grade in either an online or a face-to-face section of five gateway general education courses between Fall 2017 and Fall 2019 terms at a large, suburban, Midwestern community college. We conduct analyses using descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analyses and find that student stop-out or dropout is prevalent after they earn a D/F/W grade. Additionally, students’ first-attempt modality is not related to their probability of reenrollment or passing the second attempt with a C or better grade, but first-attempt being F2F is associated with an increased likelihood of reenrolling in a F2F section in their second attempt by 166.8%. Students’ sociodemographic and enrollment characteristics are related to their reenrollment decisions and outcomes after earning a D/F/W in their first-attempt at the gateway course. We discuss practical implications to raise awareness on post-D/F/W reenrollment decisions, provide targeted support to reengage students, and increase online teaching effectiveness to improve equitable student outcomes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. At MCC, D/F/W grades represented 30.4% of all students’ first attempts in these five gateway courses between Fall 2017 and Fall 2019, excluding summer terms. In gateway courses, a final letter grade of C or better is generally required to meet a program requirement and/or to earn progression to the next course. We acknowledge that students earning a D/F/W grade are not a homogeneous group. However, with a focus on students’ reenrollment decisions and outcomes, we focus on this student group because all D/F/W have the same result of impeding academic momentum and requiring a successful second attempt to continue a student’s program progression (Adelman, 2006; Chatman et al., 2019).

2. Because over 70% of students in the analytical sample (n = 2,673) have never taken an online course previously, this variable was not included in the model specification examining students’ probability of reenrollment.