What Were We Expecting? Analysing Expectations of German University Teachers of Study Beginners in Computer Science as Experienced by Students

We present a study about the expectations students in higher education perceived to be placed on them. The study includes higher education institutes all over Germany, distributed over the different types of private and public higher education institutes that exist in Germany. All students currently enrolled in a computer science or related study programme were targeted; we distributed the survey by identifying study coordinators for relevant study programmes, contacting them via email, and asking them to forward the study to their student body. We received 638 responses from students all over Germany in an approximately representative distribution by gender, Bundesland (German federal state) and type of institute. The study was split into four parts: general statistical questions, general skills, domain-specific bodies of knowledge, and areas where students and educators often report problems. To analyse the results, we define the concept of agreement, which is the quota of students which note the specific item to be expected or mostly expected, in comparison to all responses. In general, only soft skills were expected by teachers, with programming language being the only domain-specific body of knowledge students agreed on whether they were expected to know it. This is the same answer as found by a prior study. We found that there does not exist a singular problematic topic but rather that all areas were received to be somewhat problematic. However, female students experience more expectations and problematic topics from teachers than male students.