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Librarians at the University of South Carolina Upstate (USC Upstate) have been reaching out to transfer students during the admissions process since spring semester 2010. The form of the outreach has evolved from a test-like tutorial through two iterations of an interactive library game, most recently Agoge: The Spartan's Journey . All three versions have been targeted to transfer students during the enrollment process, using a drawing for gift cards as an added incentive for completing the activities. This article will relate the purpose and background of the game, how the most recent version was designed and what librarians have learned about the information literacy skills of incoming transfer students by analyzing several years' worth of data.
The USC Upstate, a senior campus of the USC, is located in Spartanburg with a branch campus at the University Center in nearby Greenville. The university offers 31 bachelor's degree programs and 3 master's degree programs. Student enrollment is around 5,000 FTE with a slightly higher head count. Many students are first-generation college students, and a very large proportion are transfer students - sometimes more than half of new students in fall or spring semesters. Similarly, more than half of graduates started as transfers. Most transfer students enter USC Upstate at a point in their college careers when they will not take any of the first-year courses that have dedicated library instruction sessions. Some may not make it to a library session (or even to the library) until a research methods course or senior seminar in their major. There is no common course that most transfers take nor are there many common activities targeted exclusively at transfers. The one exception is a series of transfer student orientations given before fall semester. For librarians, the question became, how to reach these students?
The high proportion of transfer students on the USC Upstate campus is not unusual. A report of the National Student Clearinghouse finds that one-third of students transfer at least once in their college careers (Hossler et al. , 2012, p. 7) and that most students transfer in their second or third year (p. 18). The prevalence of transfer students on many campuses have caused some to regard this situation as the "new normal" (Marling, 2013), with...