Graduate surveys have been conducted at Fulda University of Applied Sciences in close cooperation with the Institute for Applied Statistics (ISTAT) since the winter semester 2008/09 as part of the nationwide "Cooperation Project Graduate Studies (KOAB)". Based on the data from the surveys of the last few years, it has already been possible to make adjustments and improvements to the fit between studies and professional reality as part of the development of the study programme. Your feedback as graduates is an important database for the development of the university and the improvement of offeringsin the departments or service facilities of the university. Within the framework of the nationwide research project, approximately 70,000 graduates from more than 60 universities are surveyed annually. In this way, among other things, the survey results of individual subjects can be compared with a suitable benchmark, which enables targeted quality management. Only if enough graduates take part in the survey a representative picture of the situation after graduation can be analysed.

With the help of the graduate survey, data can be obtained that depict your situation as a graduate, your career and your retrospective assessment of your studies. Among other things, the following questions should be answered: What did you do after you graduated? In which occupations and fields of activity did you become employed and under which conditions do you work? Does your professional activity follow your studies appropriately and how do you assess your studies in retrospect?

The graduate survey is conducted annually in autumn/winter. All graduates of the previous examination year (Bachelor's and Master's programmes) are invited by post to take part in the survey. Thus, the survey forms the end point of a continuous study progress evaluation. The data will be linked to your situation in the introductory stage of your studies (first-year students survey) and your actual situation in your studies (midterm survey). The linking of different survey data enables Fulda University of Applied Sciences to identify, for example, certain university conditions that hinder or promote studying. To make this possible and at the same time guarantee the anonymity of the survey, you will be asked to generate a personal code. This code is used exclusively to be able to assign results from different surveys on the evaluation of the study situation found during and after completion of studies to the same case, without endangering your anonymity. This personal code consists of a combination of letters and numbers. This combination of information is not known to anyone at the university except you, but can be easily derived by you. The graduate survey at Fulda University of Applied Sciences is conducted on behalf of the university and its departments from a central division (Office for Learning and Teaching). The overall coordination of the project is carried out by ISTAT. ISTAT has compiled information for surveyed graduates here.

To see the previoues results of the graduate surveys, click HERE. (The results are only available in German.)

The addresses of graduates at the time of completion of their studies are available to the Student Administration Office at the university and are made available to the responsible coordinator solely for the purpose of conducting the graduate survey. The data will be deleted here no later than one year after completion of the survey. Since the last known addresses of graduates are not always up to date one year after graduation, they may be researched with the help of the residents' registration offices. For the purpose of address research and postal processing of the survey, the address data may be passed on to external service providers in strict compliance with data protection regulations. There is no linkage with the survey results.

The Hesse Higher Education Act (§ 14) requires evaluations to be carried out. The universities may use personal data of their former members if this is required exclusively for the purpose of the survey within the framework of quality assurance, reporting and evaluations or to maintain contact with these persons and if they do not object. Graduates have the right to access, rectify or erase their personal data, to restrict or object to the processing of their data and to data portability. In this case, you can contact the responsible university employee. In case of deletion or objection to the processing of their personal data, they will no longer be contacted by the university as part of the survey. In addition, data subjects have the right to lodge a complaint with the competent supervisory authority for data protection, the Hessian Officer for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (poststelle(at)datenschutz.hessen.de).

The anonymous data from the survey is analysed not only for internal university analyses for the purpose of study program development as part of quality management, but also for scientific purposes within the framework of university and graduate research and the corresponding results are published. The publications of the cooperation project do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about individual universities or persons. Within the framework of the cooperation project, a cross-university overall data set will be created that contains the answers from the questionnaire of all graduates of the universities participating in the project.

If you have any questions regarding the implementation of the graduate survey at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, please contact the Office for Teaching and Learning (evaluation(at)verw.hs-fulda.de). All matters relevant to data protection law have been coordinated with the data protection officer at Fulda University of Applied Sciences; queries can be directed to datenschutz(at)hs-fulda.de. ISTAT is responsible for the overall coordination of the project. Further information on the KOAB project and the contact persons can be found here.