An instructor or staff member submits a referral on a form your center builds, for reasons such as repeated absences or low grades, and one referral can name several students. You decide which questions the form asks and which answers are required, and Accudemia’s default form includes a sample questionnaire you can adapt instead of writing one from scratch.

An instructor who adds a referral sees the courses they teach by default, with an option to view all courses, and class referrals are limited to the current term unless you change it. Instructors can sign in with your campus single sign-on or with their Canvas login. Faculty who only refer students can be given Referral Issuer, a ready-made role limited to submitting and updating referrals.

Calumet College of St. Joseph moved its academic alerts from a web form into Accudemia, and Kishwaukee College routes faculty concerns through its advisors into Accudemia referrals. If you are still deciding how your process should work, our guide to identifying at-risk students covers the warning signs and the referral loop around the tool.

Every referral reaches the staff who follow up

When a referral is submitted, Accudemia emails the person named to follow up and copies the staff you listed when you set up the form. The referral also appears on the Referral Dashboard, the screen where your center tracks open referrals. The follow-up owner can be an instructor, a tutor or a college administrator. If the instructor leaves the owner blank, the listed staff still get the email, and a center administrator assigns an owner when the referral arrives.

A referral’s status tells you whether it has slipped. It reads New until someone owns it, Follow-up once it has an owner and a due date, and Requires Attention when the due date passes. Accudemia emails a reminder as the follow-up date gets close, and a closed referral can be reopened for any reason.

Faculty hear back at every step

Whoever follows up can add comments, change the follow-up date or hand the referral to someone else, and every edit and comment stays in the referral’s history, so the referral survives a handoff between staff. When staff update a referral, Accudemia emails the update to the instructor who raised it, so nobody has to write a separate message after each contact.

At Shreveport’s Center for Student Success, each referral goes to a Success Coach, the staff member who contacts the student. The instructor who made the referral is alerted at every contact, update and agreed action until the referral closes. Kishwaukee College tells the faculty member whether the referred student followed through.

The student is notified only when you choose

A referred student hears about an update only when the person updating the referral ticks the box to notify the student. At Calumet College of St. Joseph, flagged students now receive that notice from Accudemia, which the college’s old web form never sent.

Under our privacy policy, your institution owns these records, and we act as a school official under FERPA (the federal student privacy law) only to provide the service.

Referrals beside your visit records

Referrals sit in the same system as your center’s sign-ins, appointments and session notes. Shreveport records visits through sign-in stations (the computers and tablets where students sign in) and through appointments, in person and online. Its Success Coaches complete a session assessment (a short form about each meeting), and the university then pulls reports on which referred students followed through.

In an Accudemia user spotlight video, Shreveport walks through its referral loop, from the faculty referral to the closed case.

Students nobody has referred yet

Some students need outreach before any instructor notices them. The Zero Visits report lists the students who never came to your center during a period, and when you run it for a student group (a saved list of students) it becomes an outreach list. If you also track supplemental instruction attendance (peer-led review sessions for a course), the absence report for those sessions can list the students who have passed an absence limit you set.

Any of these reports can run on a schedule. Davis & Elkins College now sends its stakeholders recurring reports on at-risk students instead of a summary once or twice a term.

Reports on the whole program

The Referral Summary report shows the referrals made in a date range, filtered by instructor, student, class, subject or form. Referral Details adds each referral’s description and history, so you can report what happened to each one. The summary exports to PDF, Excel and CSV.

Which edition you need

Referrals come with the full edition of Accudemia, called the Accudemia License, which also runs several centers in one account. Accudemia Light is our single-center edition. It covers sign-in tracking, appointments and scheduled reports, and it does not include referrals.

Records, hosting, and who makes it

We make Accudemia at Engineerica Systems, where we have built academic and event software since 1994. By our 2024 to 2025 figures, 96 percent of institutions using Accudemia renew each year. You use it in a web browser, and we host it on Amazon Web Services in the United States.

Accudemia takes your students, classes and enrollment from your student information system on a schedule, so the class list each instructor sees stays current. Prices for both editions are on the Accudemia pricing page.

If your referrals still travel by email, request a demo with the form on this page to see the referral loop with your own form and staff.