Abstract:

Student satisfaction, as a good indicator of the ability colleges have in attracting new and retaining existing students, is constantly gaining importance in an economy evermore focused on higher educated workers. Faculties in various fields are recognizing the role student satisfaction plays in its students’ overall motivation and, consequently, their academic achievements which are linked to their ability to develop, improve and preserve a college’s reputation. Such a link is perhaps even more accentuated in colleges clustered under the STEM umbrella due to the recent, and probably future, rise of students’ interest in those fields.

This paper explores the satisfaction of undergraduate and graduate students through three domains – satisfaction with the curriculum, satisfaction with the teaching performance and knowledge evaluation, and finally, satisfaction with the effectiveness of the training provided regarding future employment.

The main goal was to establish students’ satisfaction with some selected aspects of their academic experience and to determine the extent of their contribution to the students’ overall satisfaction. Apart from that, research focused on exploring the connection between students’ previous and current academic successfulness and their satisfaction with the mentioned domains. That connection, or to be exact, the existence of influence on satisfaction was also tested for the selected demographic factors, such as age and gender.

The research was conducted on the population of students completing undergraduate and graduate studies at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Zagreb between 2013 and 2018. The greatest satisfaction of engineering students is observed in the domain of the academic curriculum, concerning mainly the number and content of study courses. However, students’ biggest dissatisfaction arises from the same domain – the one related to the curriculum, but this time it is related to the opportunities of curricular practical training and further skills development regarding the inability to attend classes on other colleges, which could be interpreted as problematic regarding the ever-present need for interdisciplinary education. The other domain leading to the student dissatisfaction is the one concerning the teaching performance and the knowledge evaluation, which is mostly related to the scope of different forms of extracurricular activities and field courses, the student involvement in the scientific research and project of faculty staff, and finally the uniformity of criteria in all classes and their ECTS credits distribution.

Keywords:

Student satisfaction, curriculum, teaching performance, knowledge evaluation, curricular practical training.