What Influences Students’ Expectations In What Regards Grades?

After a period of studying a certain subject, students form an opinion about it and begin having certain expectations. These expectations and the degree in which, in the end, they fulfil, contribute to the reputation of the university. Consequently, a continuous evaluation of the quality of the educational process is needed. The present research presents a part of a more complex study made on a sample of master students in Audit and Financial Management in Romania. The goal was to evidence the main factors that affect students’ expectations in what regards the grades they will obtain at the end of the semester. For this, a questionnaire of 20 questions was applied to 250 such students. After factor reduction procedures were applied, six most significant variables were kept in the analysis: the proportion of knowledge acquired, the perceived level of utility of the discipline in the professional career of the student, the proportion in which the subject could contribute to getting employed in the field it belongs to, the evaluation method and two variables evaluating through grades the didactic performance during the course and the overall performance of the tenure professor. The influence of these variables upon the grade expected by the student was assessed with the help of the OLS regression, both in the simple and multiple forms. Out of the six hypotheses formulated, only one proved to be false based on the simple regression analysis. When individually assessed, the evaluation method announced by the teacher at the beginning of the semester turned out to have no statistically significant influence upon students’ expectations. For the rest of the variables, results were according to the assumptions made, i.e. all determine in a significant positive manner the students’ opinion about the grade they will get. We have also constructed the multiple regression models. When putting all variables together, the significance changes. The level of difficulty of the evaluation method becomes significant, while from the rest of the variables only the proportion of knowledge acquirement still holds. The final conclusion is as expected: the higher the proportion of acquirement, the higher the grade expected at the end of the semester, while the more difficult the evaluation method, the lower the grade.