Unit-level failure is a common experience among Australian university students, but it has not received adequate attention in the higher education research literature nor, until very recently, within government policy discussions. This oversight has many causes, but one result has been to leave unexamined important subtypes of student failure, such as those that are often described by academic staff as 'ghost' or 'zombie' failures at the unit level.

Every year, a significant percentage of students remain enrolled in one or more of their units yet exhibit no evidence of having engaged in learning or assessment activities. This most severe form of student disengagement and failure frequently goes unnoticed at institutional and national levels, as it is obscured by high-level metrics such as the all too binary 'success rate.' The 'ghosting' phenomenon does not, however, go unnoticed by academic teaching staff in Australia’s universities. What they frequently witness are students who are formally enrolled in their units, but who do not attempt any assessment tasks, and neglect to formally withdraw from the unit.

This report provides an in-depth examination of 'ghost student' failure among commencing domestic bachelor students generally but focuses particularly on four student equity cohorts: regional and remote, low socioeconomic status (SES), Indigenous, and non-English speaking background (NESB) students. We term this type of unit failure a non-participating enrolment (NPE) and define it as a completed unit attempt that resulted in a failing grade and a numeric mark of zero on a 0-100 scale. NPE results can then be contrasted to what we term 'non-zero failures', or failures where a student has achieved any non-zero level of assessed credit for the unit.