Stanley D. Stephenson
Southwest Texas State University

Mentoring is a concept which is usually viewed favorably but which is also difficult to define. In an attempt to reduce attrition, many colleges use a mentoring program during students’ freshperson year which can be difficult. Students are matched with faculty or staff in an attempt to provide a ‘friendly’ image of the school. Many organizations use a mentoring-type program to orient a new hire into that organization’s culture; mentors in this type of program are often called sponsors. At higher organizational levels, mentors are used to guide high potential workers through the upward mobility track to the executive level. Regardless of the type of mentoring, they require time and effort on the part of the mentor and those in charge of the mentoring program. The required time and effort is usually the downfall of mentoring; those involved simply get tired of working on the program.

However, because such programs can work, we decided to experiment with mentoring in an introductory programming class in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) major. CIS 2371 is the first ‘heavy-duty’ programming class in the major. Because it is usually taken during the sophomore year, it carries with it the burden of being a difficult course and also a course taken before some students get serious about graduating and their grades.

In theory, all students who take CIS 2371 should have the aptitude to complete the course. The average entering freshperson SWT ACT score is over 20, and over 90 percent come from the top half of their high school class. Plus, all CIS 2371 students have previously completed a basic programming tools course. So, students should be able to do well. But, we typically experience attrition rates of over 15 percent. We wanted to determine if there was some way we could help those who attrite. What we really wanted to do was to have a credible source get in touch with students who were struggling in CIS 2371 and, just before that moment when a student decides to toss it in, communicate to the student that he or she can do it, hang in there, etc.

Because we are a small department (n=9 CIS faculty), trying to assign a faculty member as a mentor to the more than 50 CIS 2371 students would be unworkable and doomed to failure. We elected to try mentoring using primarily electronic means. Twenty ‘at-risk’ students (those who had not done well on the first exam) were matched with CIS graduates in an electronic mentoring program. Nine CIS alumni who had expressed interest in participating in a mentoring program were each assigned one, two or three mentorees matched on gender.

Mentors were asked to contact the students, tell the students a little about their experiences, and express an interest in the students. Technical advice was not given nor offered. Mentors were asked to contact their mentorees primarily via e-mail but that other means (phone, letter, etc.) were obviously acceptable The students in the program were not told why they were selected, but the instructor did indicate that some students might be hearing from CIS graduates during the semester.

The results were dramatic. During the two semesters before and the two semesters after the mentor intervention, total class attrition averaged 18 percent. During the intervention semester, attrition was 6 percent. During the before and after semesters, the total percent of all students who received a D, F, or Drop averaged 34 percent; during the intervention semester it was 13 percent. The grade breakout for the 20 mentorees was:

Sixteen of these 20 students received a grade of C or higher. Eighteen months later, 14 of these 20 students were still CIS majors or had graduated with a CIS degree. Four of the 20 students received a D, F, or Drop. During non-intervention semesters, the rate for a similar group of students was typically between 40 and 50 percent.

The reasons why this mentoring program worked are difficult to determine. Mentors averaged about two contacts per mentoree. However, only five of the students ever responded to their mentors’ messages. So, the decrease in attrition may not have been due to what the mentors said but simply due to them having said it. Evidently, once these ‘at-risk’ students knew that someone was watching and caring for them, they increased the effort they put into the course.

These results are important for two reasons. First, more students who had initially wanted to be CIS majors stayed in the program. In a sense, we ‘helped’ a number of students overcome a real or imagined hurdle. Second, a larger number of students advanced to the next level. For a program administrator, these numbers are very important. Basically, for every two semesters we can get such reduced attrition, we later get an ‘extra’ section in our upper division courses. So, the program helped a number of students both to stay on track and to avoid a sense of failure. It also helped our CIS program by increasing our enrollment which permits us more flexibility in, for instance, the number of elective courses we can offer.

Such a program should have appeal to the military for those courses which typically experience high but unwanted attrition. Using electronic mentoring, recent school graduates could be linked to students still in school to promote interest and motivation. Recent graduates actually want to perform this type of community service, and during those dark days of the most difficult portion of a course, students want to hear from someone who has recently gone through the same difficulties. It really is a win-win situation.