Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) is a private university, home to over 15,000 enrolled students, 76% of which live in college-owned, operated, or affiliated housing. Since implementing Advocate more than 10 years ago, WashU has been a proud Symplicity partner, using Advocate to standardize their reporting process by hosting everything in one place to spot student conduct trends and keeping all stakeholders and students informed across WashU’s campus to ensure student safety.
Highlights:
- WashU has been a proud Symplicity partner for over 10 years, utilizing Advocate to effectively streamline workflows across campus.
- Using Advocate’s name check module, allows faculty and staff using the system to easily pull up a student profile whether it be for a wellness check or for past indiscretions.
- Hosting everything in Advocate allows WashU to have everything involved in the student conduct process all in one place for accurate reporting and analysis.
Advocate at Washington University in St. Louis
Staff
In any given year, WashU’s Student Conduct Office handles close to 3,500 student conduct cases with four staff members. Using Advocate has allowed for staff to streamline workflows, see how cases are coming in, the ability to assign and reassign cases, leave notes, and have everything involved in the student conduct process all in one place. For the Student Conduct Office, they use Advocate to deal with everything from behavioral concerns, discrimination cases, to handling adjudication with information from campus partners, student life, professors, staff, campus police, and more. Additionally, WashU uses Advocate to assist its Academic Integrity Deans to track academic dishonesty cases.
“Our reporting piece is something that we truly utilize a lot to help with our assessment and telling the cases and who we’re hearing in the story of our office.”
Kyle Williams, MEd,
Assistant Director of Student Conduct and Community Standards, University of Washington in St. Louis
Students
One of the biggest improvements to WashU’s Student Conduct Office was Advocate’s name check process. Through a simple search, the office can easily go in and see if a student has had a previous violation through the integration of Advocate across all offices involved with student conduct from the Academic Integrity Office, Student Organizations, all the way up to the Dean of Students. Ultimately, having all of the information, data, and reporting makes Advocate the foundation for streamlining their student conduct process, saving them endless hours searching for the right set of information. When it comes to end of year reporting, Advocate accurately tracks how many cases have come in one year, how those cases were handled, where they stand, and ways to improve specific processes through customization.
Residential Life
Advocate is used campus-wide for all conduct matters, yet one of the biggest users is WashU’s Residential Life. Advocate is used daily by both the residential advisors and directors to track student conflict issues that occur on campus. Once an incident report is filed in Advocate, residential life directors are able to pull up all the information on a student, see past indiscretions, read the full incident report, and then send it to the Student Conduct Office for further action.
With the reporting tool, WashU’s Student Conduct Office can, at any time, assess the type of incidents that occur annually to see underlying conduct trends. From wellness checks, keeping notes on roommate conflicts, issues with classes, to any student code violations that happen on-campus, Advocate allows for all aspects of a student’s life to be effectively communicated to the necessary stakeholders. The communication across all offices helps campus leadership proactively address issues with their students of concern.
With Advocate, WashU has been able to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks and allows campus leaders to focus on how to best help their students.
“Advocate allows us to see what cases are coming in and have everything
in a process and have a space. Everyone has access to it; that, for me, is very important… You can make sure to keep students accountable for the things they’re going to do… Scheduling meetings with Advocate is especially ideal.”Kyle Williams, MEd,
Assistant Director of Student Conduct and Community Standards, University of Washington in St. Louis
