A group of five McCourt School of Public Policy graduate students won the McCourt Public Policy Challenge with their proposal AppSent, a mobile-based application designed to address low high-school graduation rates in D.C. schools.

The winning team included Natalie Duarte (GRD ’16), Nahal Jalali (GRD ’16), Amir Jilani (GRD ’16), Julian Koschorke (GRD ’16) and Kirstin Roster (GRD ’16).

The app aims to address poor academic performance and absenteeism as precursors for D.C.’s low high school graduation rates, using a platform aimed at creating effective communication between teachers, students and guardians.

According to Jilani, the students developed AppSent in response to the prompt for the competition, which required that each proposal address a local problem and offer a small-scale intervention that could deliver large benefits.

“In our research there were a couple of things that emerged,” Jilani said. “One of them was D.C.’s low high school graduation rate, which is actually the lowest in the country. After that it was a process of investigating why the graduation rate is so low, and what the key predictors for it are. We began thinking about innovative policy intervention that could address, in the medium- to long-term, high school dropouts.”

Roster explained how she and fellow team members consulted various experts as they developed their proposal.

“Once we decided that we wanted to address the issue of the dropout rate, we spoke to some people who were experts on the field, including the economics lab here on campus,” Roster said. “In collaboration with those experts, we decided that we wanted to focus on technology specifically, which is how we started thinking about AppSent.”

Jalani added that the team already has a potential implementing partner who has agreed to use AppSent in its school if the app proves to be successful.

The selection process for the competition was carried out through a forum on Feb. 6. Each of the seven teams that competed was allotted 10 minutes to present its proposal to the judging panel. After a question-and-answer period, the judges voted on the proposals before meeting to determine final rankings.

McCourt School Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Mark Rom, who served as one of the competition judges, explained why AppSent was ultimately chosen as the winning proposal.

“There were several reasons we thought it was the highest quality among a number of high-quality presentations,” Rom said. “It addressed an important problem, and it offered a reasonable approach to that problem. There is a high likelihood that it could work; it could be tried out on a small-scale, and if it works it could be expanded. It included a good use of both technology and behavioral economics — all of these characteristics spoke very highly of it.”

Professors of public policy Barbara Schone, Margaret O’Bryon, Micah Jenson, John Buttarazzi and Simone Bunse also served as judges, along with previous challenge competitors Suzanne Falk and Madeline Pongor.

The six other McCourt School teams developed policy interventions addressing a range of issues, from unlicensed and unregulated day care centers in Virginia to high rates of HIV infection in D.C.

The AppSent team received $1000 in tuition scholarship through its winning proposal and will represent the McCourt School at the University of Pennsylvania’s 2015 Fourth Annual National Invitational Public Policy Challenge, held March 21 to 22.

The challenge is hosted annually by the Fels Institute of Government at Penn and sponsored by Governing Magazine.

The team’s travel expenses to Penn will be covered by the McCourt student travel fund.

The McCourt School at Georgetown has sent a team to this invitational for the past two years. However, McCourt School Assistant Director of Student Affairs Jaclyn Clevenger noted this was the first year that McCourt hosted its own internal competition.

“For the past several years Penn has hosted a National Invitational Challenge, inviting some of the country’s top public policy schools to compete against one another,” Clevenger wrote in an email. “I thought it would be very important for McCourt to host our own internal competition to encourage our students to learn more about local issues in D.C., but also to help prepare them for the National Challenge.”

At the national challenge in March, the proposals will be judged according to criteria regarding the articulation of the problem’s importance, the demonstrated potential impact of the initiative, the feasibility of the approach, the quality of the implementation plan and the quality of the final oral presentation.

The winning team will receive $10,000, with the three other finalists each receiving $5,000.

Koschorke emphasized the team’s excitement at being able to present its idea on a national stage.

“It’s nice that in the second semester of our graduate degree, we can see how far an idea that we’ve come up with, one we’ve developed an implementation plan for, can go in terms of a national response,” Koschorke said. “To actually come up with a policy intervention — it’s a first experience in that kind of process.”