Quality management

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering conducts a department-wide course evaluation (LVE) every three semesters. The quality of the lectures, didactic implementation and other aspects of teaching quality are recorded. Independently of the three-semester rotation, many lecturers evaluate their courses on their own initiative each semester. Since the summer semester of 2022, the EvaSys software has been used for the LVE.

In addition, the department conducts a number of other surveys as part of BIWSTEQ(CivilEngineeringPermanentEvaluationand Quality Assurance System):

• Survey of the first semester (once a year in November)
• Survey of the fourth semester (once a year in May)
• Survey on the completion of studies (continuously in the study and examination office)
• Occasion-related surveys on student workload (e.g. 2009, 2013, 2020)

This provides the department with valuable data for the further development of the study programs. Through their evaluation in the qualitative and quantitative questions, students have the opportunity to contribute directly to the improvement of the quality of study and teaching. Launched as a project in 2003, BIWSTEQ allows comparisons to be made both between and within cohorts.

The surveys are voluntary and anonymous; no personal data of students are collected or processed.

BIWSTEQ is supplemented by various evaluation instruments of the central quality management, including the Bachelor and Master surveys introduced as part of the Teaching Quality Pact (2012-2020). In cooperation with the Institute for Applied Statistics (ISTAT), graduate surveys are conducted annually. From the results, specific volumes of results are made available for the study programs in civil and environmental engineering.

As part of the ProUmwelt project (2018-2020, Andreas Wagner), special surveys were conducted in cooperation with the Institute for Higher Education Development (HIS-HE) with stakeholders from industry and academia on three different subprojects. The first sub-project pursued further development of the curricula, the second involved a professional field analysis, and the third sub-project aimed to improve internal committee and organizational structures.

In 2020, a follow-up project started to develop student mentoring and two online study choice assistants (OSA) for civil engineering (link) and environmental engineering(link). The project was successfully completed in 2021 and since then the online study choice assistants have been available to all prospective students.

Results of all projects and surveys are in the data section below.

LVE results are publicly available.
All other survey results can only be accessed by logging in with a University of Kassel account.