During recent decades, there has been an influx of underprepared students in America's colleges and universities. At many institutions, programs have been created to assist these high risk students through special classes and/or support services. Through application of student development theory these programs can shed the negative connotations of…

The Introductory Writing Programs developed for freshman students at Northeastern University are described in this document. The introduction outlines the programs' philosophy, which is based on the notion that all writers are developing writers regardless of their ability. The second section looks at how students are placed in either Freshman…