Waiving academic warnings during the pandemic to 'help' students actually backfired and led to way more people failing later on.
EdArXiv · March 17, 2026 · zvbdw_v2
The Takeaway
This 'realist evaluation' found that emergency leniency created 'academic debt.' By allowing underprepared students to stay enrolled without warnings, the university merely deferred their attrition; students accumulated failures in more difficult, sequential courses later on, leading to worse outcomes than if they had been stopped or remediated early.
From the abstract
The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine campus implemented emergency academic concessions during COVID-19 – waiving Required to Withdraw (RTW) dismissals and suspending academic warnings – to keep students enrolled. This study uses institutional data (2017–2024) and a realist evaluation approach to examine how the policy affected student progression across five faculties, through the lens of academic momentum theory. Results show the impact was highly context-dependent. In sequent