It's the last two weeks of the term. The clinic is winding down, finals are starting, and the queue of unsigned SOAP notes is somehow at its longest. If that scene feels familiar, you're not alone. Every university speech clinic in the country is running the same race right now, and most of them are running it across three different systems.
This end of semester slp clinic checklist is for supervisors, clinic directors, and graduate student clinicians who want a structured way to close the books without losing a weekend to reconciliation work. It's organized into five categories: documentation, clinical hours, supervision, client hand-off, and administrative closeout. Work through it in order and most of the usual surprises stop being surprises.
Documentation: Close Every Open Note Before You Close the Books
The most predictable end-of-term problem is the one you can see coming for 14 weeks: notes that were drafted but never co-signed, progress reports that got pushed off, and clients who finished their last session without a discharge summary in the file.
Start with the basics:
- A SOAP note for every session attended this term, drafted and co-signed by a CCC-SLP. Every session documentation written by a student needs a supervisor signature before it's part of the official clinical record.1
- A progress report for each active client covering current goals, baseline versus current performance, and recommendations for next semester.
- A discharge summary for any client not returning. ASHA guidance suggests documenting the discharge within 48 hours of the final session for outpatient cases.2
- Evaluations, intake forms, and treatment plans signed and filed.
Then run a documentation gap audit. If you can pull a report of incomplete records, do it. If you can't, scan your folders for missing co-signatures, blank discharge fields, and progress reports that never got finalized. The programs that close cleanly do this weekly all semester, so by week 14 there's nothing left to find.
A note on cadence: documentation should be a continuous workflow, not a deadline sprint.3 A practicum coordinator who runs a 15-minute audit every Monday will catch most gaps in the same week they happen, when fixing them is still trivial. The same audit run once at the end of the term is a much bigger weekend.
Clinical Hours: Reconcile CALIPSO Before You Submit
CALIPSO is the official record used to verify clinical hours toward ASHA certification and licensure, so the numbers there have to match reality.4 But CALIPSO doesn't talk to your session documentation, your supervisor binder, or your scheduling system. That's where the work lives.
Before submission:
- Log every direct contact hour and observation hour in CALIPSO.
- Reconcile CALIPSO totals against session documentation. They should match by client, date, and supervisor. If a student has 40 direct hours logged but only 36 sessions in the EMR, you need to know where the other four came from.
- Confirm the ASHA minimums. Graduate students need at least 400 supervised clinical hours and 25 observation hours before practicum, with at least 25% direct supervision of treatment and 50% of evaluation sessions.5
- Submit your program's clock hour forms (the SC-10 or your local equivalent) with the supervisor's ASHA number and signature.
- Verify supervisor credentials are current. An expired CCC-SLP means the hours don't count, and finding that out in June is much worse than finding it out in April.
This is where the "three-system problem" shows up most clearly. Hours in CALIPSO. Sessions in your EMR or paper chart. Signatures in a binder or a separate form. Every reconciliation between those three systems is a place where small errors hide.
The fix isn't more discipline. It's fewer systems. When session documentation, supervisor approval, and hour tracking all live in one place, the reconciliation isn't a task. It just is.
Supervision: Clear the Co-Signature Backlog and Finalize Evaluations
If you're a supervisor, the end of the term is when the co-signature queue gets ugly. Every SOAP note, progress note, and evaluation written by a student needs a CCC-SLP co-signature before it becomes part of the official clinical record. By week 14, that queue has been accumulating quietly for months.
Work through it in order:
- Review and co-sign every pending note. Don't batch-sign without reading. The signature is the supervision; it has to be real.
- Complete final KASA-aligned student evaluations. A practical tip from supervisors who do this every semester: duplicate the midterm evaluation form and edit from there for the final.6 Starting from scratch every term is a self-inflicted wound.
- Document any clinical KASA standard that did not earn a "met" rating, along with the remediation plan.
- Collect student-of-supervisor evaluations for program review and accreditation.
- Hold your final clinical performance review meetings. Most programs review students twice per semester in a large group format with supervisory staff.
One quirk worth flagging: "met" thresholds vary by program. Some require a B or better; others set the bar at B- for first-year clinicians.6 Whatever your standard is, write it on the evaluation form so students aren't guessing what they need to clear.
This is also the section of the university speech clinic semester wrap-up where the supervisor shortage hits hardest. Adjunct CCC-SLPs who supervise one day a week are juggling a private practice caseload and a co-signature queue. Real-time supervisor review, where you can co-sign while the student is still in the building, dissolves most of that backlog. End-of-term batch signing creates it.
Client Hand-Off: Write the File the Next Clinician Actually Needs
For continuing clients, the file you leave behind decides how much progress carries forward into the next term. A clean hand-off saves the incoming clinician two hours of file reconstruction. A messy one resets the client.
For each continuing client:
- Write a hand-off summary covering current goals, the last three session highlights, family preferences, scheduling notes, and materials used.
- Confirm the next semester's clinician has access. Adjust permission sets, update caseload assignments, and verify the new clinician can see what they need to see (and nothing they shouldn't).
- Note any unresolved scheduling, billing, or family-communication threads so they don't fall to the new clinician cold.
For clients not returning:
- Finalize the discharge summary.
- Document the family conference notes.
- Include referral information when applicable.
Then file working materials per your program policy. A common standard is to keep the two most recent semesters in working files and archive everything older. Whatever your policy is, follow it. Empty student mailboxes, lockers, and physical workspace before the last day on campus.
A pediatric language client who works with three different graduate clinicians over 18 months either gets a clean hand-off every six months or starts over every six months. The difference is the 5-minute hand-off note. That's it. Make writing it a requirement, not a courtesy.
Administrative Closeout: Don't Leave the Clinic Director Holding the Bag
Most of the slp clinic closeout checklist falls on supervisors and students. The administrative pieces fall on the clinic director, and they're the ones that get pushed into the first week of break if no one plans for them.
Before the term ends:
- Reconcile billing and pending claims, especially for clinics that bill insurance or operate on a sliding-scale model.
- Release room reservations and pause recurring appointments for the break.
- Generate the reports the director actually needs: caseload summary, documentation completion rate, hours summary by student, and any CAA-relevant audit data.
- Back up or archive per program policy.
- Schedule a 30-minute supervisor debrief for the first week of the break to catch process gaps while they're still fresh in everyone's mind.
If your program is in a CAA accreditation cycle, this is also when the clean audit trail matters most. CAA reviewers expect traceable, auditable records, not just totals.7 If your end-of-term reports take two days to pull by hand, your accreditation prep takes two weeks. If they take five minutes to pull from your EMR, the prep is almost free.
A debrief is the most underrated piece of the whole semester end university speech clinic process. Thirty minutes with the supervisory team, in the first week of break, asking three questions: What slipped? What went well? What do we change for next semester? That meeting is where your closeout actually gets better year over year.
How a Purpose-Built University EMR Changes the Rhythm
Most programs run end-of-term documentation slp across three different systems. CALIPSO for hours. An EMR (or paper, or a stack of Microsoft Forms) for documentation. A binder or shared drive for signatures. The seams between those systems are where work gets lost, and the end of the semester is when those seams stretch the most.
A purpose-built university EMR removes the seams. Real-time supervisor co-signature workflow dissolves the terminal signature backlog. Documentation gap reports surface incomplete notes weekly instead of at week 15. Permission sets and patient-level caseload restrictions keep student boundaries clean for hand-off. Custom reports for KASA, CAA, and hours summaries run in seconds.
This isn't a sales argument. It's a question about cadence. If your current setup forces work to surface in week 15 that should have surfaced in week 5, that's not a discipline problem on your team. It's a tooling problem, and it shows up in everyone's hours, including yours.
Make Next Semester's slp Graduate Clinic Semester End Quieter
The end of semester slp clinic checklist isn't long, but it is dense: documentation, clinical hours, supervision, client hand-off, and administrative closeout. The programs that close cleanly aren't the ones that work harder in week 15. They're the ones that work in a steady weekly cadence, so by the time the term ends, there's almost nothing left to do.
That's the real takeaway. The fix is cadence, not effort.
Closing out the term across three different systems? ClinicNote is a full-suite EMR built for university speech clinics. Real-time supervisor review, documentation gap reporting, and CAA-friendly custom reports live in one place, so semester closeout is a continuous workflow instead of a deadline sprint. Get a demo and see what your last two weeks of the term could look like.
Sources
- https://www.asha.org/practice/supervision/SLP-graduate-student-supervision/
- https://www.asha.org/practice/reimbursement/module-three/
- https://www.clinicnote.com/resources/caa-accreditation-documentation-requirements
- https://slhs.sfsu.edu/clockhours
- https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/professional-issues/clinical-education-and-supervision/
- https://www.asha.org/practice/supervision/supervisortips/
- https://www.clinicnote.com/resources/caa-accreditation-documentation-requirements