Matching & Binding

Title
Matching & Binding

Project team
Rina Vaatstra (projectleader), Paul Adriaans, Annette Schade, Marc Weerts

Finance
UM Leading in Learning, pillar Study success

Projectgoal
How to select the students that match with your program? Although our faculty does the very best to inform our prospective students through brochures, open days and website, we are unable to prevent all students starting our programmes with the wrong expectations. During the first year some students find that their expectations do not match with the real program and will drop-out. From the students’ perspective this is a waste of study time and money. From the perspective of the faculty, reducing the drop-out rate is a key objective. 

Project description
By means of an online questionnaire students are encouraged to think about their motivation, study attitude, study skills and study expectations. We ask them about their expectations of the PBL-system, expected self-study hours, hours of planned activities next to their study. Based on their answers, prospective students received the codes green, orange or red. There were two possibilities: orange and red students were invited for an interview with the director of studies or they received a mail with the message to think deeply about their choice.

Results indicated that several characteristics predicted students’ average grades and obtained credits in their first year of study. These characteristics were: study skills, hours of self-study and the average examination grades from secondary school. For the current batch we concentrated also on qualitative questions about students’ motivation for chosen bachelor. From 2013-2014 onwards, this matching questionnaire was used as a selection instrument for the decentralized selection.