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Summary of the StV-Evaluation | 2025
As student representatives, the ÖH Student Union for Computer Science ("ÖH StV Informatik") depends on feedback to do its job properly.
We therefore sent out surveys to all our students via email and Discord and collected your responses from 14.01. to 06.02.2025.
These are the detailed results for each question and the consequences we draw from them.
Demographics
58 people participated in our survey.
What are you studying?
| Study | # |
|---|---|
| Bachelor Informatik | 71% |
| Master Computer Science | 29% |
How many semesters have you been studying Computer Science at JKU (including this winter semester)?
In other words: If you are in your Master's and have also done your BSc CS at JKU, add both together.
As you can see, we are apparently quite good at reaching newer students: Even when accounting for student numbers per semester, "young" students make up a relatively high share of respondents. Keep that in mind for future stats - unless noted otherwise, we did not find significant differences in responses between semester or study, however.
ÖH Election
From 13. to 15.05.2025, the biennial elections of the Student Union will take place throughout all of Austria. As usual, this comes with PR campaigns from the various university parties, drowning out some of our work as an independent body.
For that reason, we wanted to know:
Do you know the difference between the following terms: ÖH JKU, ÖH TNF, ÖH StV Informatik?
and
Do you know what this means: "StV Informatik is unfraktioniert (independent)"?
If respondents picked "No" or "Not sure", they were given the following explanations:
Your student representation is organized in different, independent layers: ÖH JKU represents you for uni-wide topics, we as ÖH StV Informatik represent you for all study-related topics.
The StVs of the whole technical faculty work together as ÖH TNF to bring you bigger events etc. More on this can be found in our FAQs (here).
This survey is explicitly about the StV Informatik.
and
No member of the StV Informatik belongs to a political party of the university ("Fraktion"). We represent you independently and in a non-partisan way, the same is also true for the whole ÖH TNF.
More on this can be found in our FAQs (here).
Overall, we were happy to see that many respondents know these terms. Still, we want to make sure that the remaining ~19% also receive more information on the topic to make an informed choice at the election.
You will hear more from us on this matter in the next semester!
By providing explanations directly, we wanted to make sure that your feedback throughout the rest of the survey is specific to us, and not one of our associated organisations.
StV Informatik
Do you agree with the following statements about the StV Informatik?
The following could be answered using a scale from 1 (Do not agree at all) to 7 (Fully agree). The mean and median are given to account for outliers.
| Statement | Median | Mean |
|---|---|---|
| I am generally happy with the StV's work. | 6 | 5.7 |
| The StV provides a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere at events. | 7 | 6.0 |
| I feel represented by the StV. | 6 | 5.5 |
| I can always ask a member of the StV when I have a study-related question. | 7 | 6.0 |
| The StV answers my questions with care and competence. | 7 | 5.9 |
| The StV is transparent. | 6 | 5.7 |
Overall, we are very happy with these results. Still, there are some things we seek to improve on:
Representation and Transparency
We are trying to have your voice heard in our committees: This year, we have started to invite you to public hearings for new professor applicants to get broader feedback. We are also publishing summaries of our meetings, have a public dashboard of all our projects and invite you to propose agenda points for our committees - see https://oeh.jku.at/cs/transparency for more.
Unfortunately, we did not receive proposals on how to improve our transparency - please let us know; we are happy to look into it!
We'll talk more about things you want us to represent in the Study chapter.
Competence and Approachability
We are currently in the process of renewing our team - in other words, "older" more experienced members are leaving, and "younger" ones are joining the ranks. We are happy to see that this process does not seem to have hurt your perception of our competence. We'll try to get everyone up to speed by hosting a training weekend for all of our new members in March, and we will join an international conference in June to further improve our guidance work.
Inclusive Atmosphere
We are glad to see that you feel comfortable at our events. Following your feedback in 2023, we introduced Awareness Teams to all of our bigger events. We are happy to see that the rest of the student union is following suit, and we are still improving our system in the background.
What should we improve, what services are we missing?
Services of the StV are, for example:
Discord Server, Website, Study Guide, FAQs, Roomsearch, Grade Calculator, StV-Dashboard, Stuko-Transparency-Doc, Informatik-Mentoring, Confidential Contacts
You complimented us on our Study Guides but pointed out that a similar guide would be very valuable for Master's students. We agree and have started to work on a Master's Study Guide. We will comb through our Bachelor Guide to find things that should be mirrored and will try to identify new topics that are more relevant.
We were also made aware that International Students need more support - while this is largely outside of our responsibilities (ÖH JKU has a dedicated department on the matter), we understand the need for more efficient and reliable service. We are considering addinga section to our new Master's Guide, given that our German Bachelor's programme does not usually attract international students. In the meantime, please check out our International FAQs.
We were asked to introduce a tutoring system through which students help students understand more difficult subjects. We have tried this in the past (twice), with very limited success - while we had many students volunteering to offer their help, few asked for help. We are somewhat ready to give up on the idea now, especially since ÖH JKU has just launched a paid tutoring program. We'll see how this develops before we give it another shot.
We have also received some ideas on how to improve our FAQs from a technical standpoint - we are cooking up a fun little project; you might hear more about it soon!
Events
Are there any additional events the StV Informatik should host? Do you have suggestions for improvement of existing events?
Following last year's feedback, we introduced our bi-weekly Casual Boardgame Sessions. From your responses, it seems that you are huge fans, as has also been apparent from the number of visitors the event attracts. We are happy to hear they bring so many of you joy!
Like last year, we were also asked to do more Company Excursions - one is already in the works, you'll hear more about it soon!
And finally, like every year, there is this one indomitable person that keeps requesting a Soccer Tournament. We really appreciate your commitment and want to thank you for always taking part in our survey. Still, like every year, we ask you to please instead hit up the Sportreferat, the ÖH JKU's department tasked with organizing such events.
When would you like StV events to take place during the week (Mo-Thu)?
Multiple time slots could be picked.
This one looks pretty clear-cut to us: We will try to schedule events directly after lectures end. Given that this summer semester should once again allow for outdoor events, we'll balance this with our requirements for sunlight and temperature.
Should the StV Informatik ban alcohol at selected events ("Sober Events")?
Although we currently don't offer alcohol at some events (board game sessions, etc.), we do not prohibit alcohol from being brought in.
Events that we provide alcohol for (Regulars' Tables, Welcome Party…) will not be affected.
Naturally, all of our events offer non-alcoholic options, and we always try to promote them as such. We sometimes offer alcohol as well, however, and we usually don't prevent you from bringing your own drinks.
We know from last year's feedback that not all students feel comfortable at events with alcohol consumption, for a multitude of reasons (e.g. addiction or religious reasons), so we are considering a ban at some of our events.
This one is not as clear-cut as many other questions. There do seem to be many people that would appreciate an alcohol ban, and just about as many who are against it - we'll bring the stat up with our different organisational teams. They'll investigate if they believe a ban makes sense at their events.
We do see a difference in academic age for this question: Newer students are a lot more open to "Sober Events" than those in higher semesters. We might ask you again next year to see if there are any developments.
Regardless of our orga team's decision, we will of course always make sure that our guests know their limits, and we clearly communicate our guidelines (see e.g. here for the JKU Games).
Should the StV stop offering meat at events?
If we exclusively offer vegetarian and vegan options, this reduces our costs/effort.
Because of that we can offer more meals.
As laid out in the question text, there are clear benefits to reducing our offers: As you can probably imagine, it e.g. takes more people to man separate grills for different food items, increasing waiting times at events. We also produce more waste and have higher costs because we can't bulk-order as much.
From our communication with Student Unions at other universities, we know that we are a bit of an outlier. Not only do we organise a lot more events than most, but other universities also tend to offer vegan or vegetarian food only.
From experience, we know that around a quarter of our students prefer vegetarian or vegan food options at our events. We wanted to find out if the meat-eating majority would be okay with switching to a plant-based meal option.
For each of our events, we offer different food options. For example, at our biggest events:
| Event | Current Meat Option(s) | Current Vegan Option(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome Party ("Einstandsfest") | Meat-Loaf ("Leberkäse") | Chilli |
| StV-Barbecue | Cutlet, Sausages | Burger Patties |
| ÖH TNF Barbecue | Suckling Pig, Cutlet, Sausages | Burger Patties, Sausages |
We asked you for each of these events separately and listed the food options above. These are the results:
We can see that there is a clear majority in favour of continuing to offer meat at our BBQ events, while you seem more open to trying our tasty chilli at the Einstandsfest. We'll forward these stats to our planning teams.
Naturally, this decision does not have to be as dichotomous as we made it out here: We might, for example, reduce the meat variety or raise its price at events where we sell it.
We also wanted to address your concerns and add that our meat is already of very high quality: For example, we source our BBQ meat from a local organic farmer and personally visit them every year for a tour of their farm. We are not willing to lower these standards to reduce prices.
Study
StV Informatik is involved in most decisions made about your studies. For example, we discuss your curriculum and the structure of your courses in the Study Committee: Here we vote on which courses are mandatory, and which ones should be newly introduced. In other committees we help decide who gets to become a professor at JKU. Our current talking points can be found here.
We therefore wanted to know:
How satisfied are you with your studies?
The following could be answered using a scale from 1 (Very dissatisfied) to 7 (Very satisfied). The mean and median are given to account for outliers.
| How satisfied are you… | Median | Mean |
|---|---|---|
| with your study over all? | 6 | 5.3 |
| with the structure and contents of your study? | 5 | 5.1 |
| with the quality of teaching? | 5 | 5.1 |
| with the interaction between teachers and students? | 6 | 5.8 |
Results are similar across semesters and study programs (BSc vs. MSc).
What is something the StV should fight for in committees and working groups? What should stay as it is; what should be changed?
Working Students
We know from JKU's publications that many of our students also work on the side. JKU-wide, about three quarters have a job, and of these, half work more than 20 hours per week. These numbers are also reflected among our students, and it shows in your responses.
Talks about this topic stretch across all university committees and are hotly debated right now. JKU is struggling to find a balance between accommodating students and keeping study quality high. Similar conflict exists between the demands of full-time students (classes during the day) and working students (classes in the evening), as well as with university staff (don't want to teach in the evening).
We are conflicted in the Student Union as well: There are, for example, clear downsides to moving towards online-only (students are way less informed, are struggling to find study groups, are less likely to pick up on social conventions and social skills…) that we can see from our AI colleagues.
We are trying to handle this topic with as much nuance as possible, e.g. speaking up in favor of attendance requirements in some courses for earlier BSc semesters while opposing them for other MSc courses.
Many of these decisions are taken on a university-wide level and fall into ÖH JKU's responsibility, though we do assist them there as well.
Better study materials and more supporting video content are clear demands in all areas, however. It is important to keep in mind that the overall quality of material in our studies is comparatively high: We are making use of your course feedback to talk to outliers specifically (see StuKo Doc).
Course Language
You requested that the course language should be communicated before the start of courses: We are aware that KUSSS and the actual language used have grown out-of-sync. This should be fixed in the new curriculum starting in October (see StuKo Doc).
In general, we are working on a new Study Handbook and curriculum management software uni-wide. Small changes are coming in October (i.e. a clearer description of course contents and goals), structural changes (e.g. which courses are hybrid, course language etc.) are still being discussed.
As StV, we are generally cautiously in favor of switching courses to English, especially in higher semesters. These changes need to be clearly communicated, however, and need to be made in tandem with transparent advertising for the study programme (hence our implemented proposals for JKU's website). We now also assess language capabilities of all new professor candidates to ensure teaching staff is ready as well (see our feedback form for applications).
Clearer Relations Between Course Content and Application
Courses should clearly show students why their content matters in the grand scheme of Computer Science. While we like the study programme's's structure in general, we do understand that it sometimes takes a while for this overarching understanding to set in. We hope that the new course descriptions mentioned before help a bit, and we will also remind lecturers to make these implicit connections more explicit.
We like your proposal for a hardware-focused course in which you actually get to dismantle and understand a PC from the ground up. For obvious reasons, there are hefty budget constraints and an issue of scaleability, but this might be an interesting area for an elective course. We'll see if we can cook up something.
Tutoring for Maths
You requested tutoring for math courses. We understand that the learning curve for mathematic proofing is steep. "Unfortunately", dropout rates for these courses are generally very low, leading to little incentive for JKU to invest funding in additional support. We'll look into it but can't make any promises.
Reach
We wanted to find out which of our public-facing services you use:
Have you visited our website during this semester?
You can find our website here: oeh.jku.at/cs
About two thirds answered "yes", which is surprisingly low in our opinion. Given the amount of information we provide via the website (such as links to various services, documents and transparency insights), we assumed this number to be a lot higher. We think that this might be the case because we mirror much of this data to our Discord server as well.
Generally speaking, you seem to be quite happy with our new website. We should have clarified that the website and its tech stack is not in our control, just the content on our sub-page. As any good CS student would, you gave us a lot of technical feedback and feature requests that we unfortunately cannot implement ("use more Angular" was our favorite) - we'll make sure to forward your feedback to the IT department and their external contractor.
We did implement your request for easier navigation, though: Our most relevant sub pages are now listed in the page's navigation menu.
Do you use our Discord Server ("Informatik & AI JKU")?
You can find our Discord Server here: oeh.jku.at/cs/discord
Unsurprisingly, almost all active students are on our Discord server.
We can also see that our Discord server is predominantly used to aid in your studies, and as a way to get information on upcoming events. We are also happy to see that many seem to be interested in our work, and that our strategy of providing extensive resources via our Study Guides and FAQs seems to have reduced your need to ask questions to us directly.
Do you usually read our emails (Sender "ÖH TNF" or "ÖH Informatik")?
We cheekily used src-tagged links this year, sending out an invite to the survey via email a few hours before advertising it on Discord. We were pleasantly surprised by your email reading habits; a solid half of you checked your email before you received our Discord ping.
Overall, we were a bit surprised that some consider our email frequency as "spammy", given that this was the second email of the semester from ÖH Informatik, and the fourth for ÖH TNF and us combined. We assume that there might have been some confusion between our emails and the much more frequent communication from ÖH JKU.
We will continue to advertise our biggest events and important information via email and are happy to see that we reach most of you that way.
Do you use our event calendar?
You can find our calendar here: oeh.jku.at/cs/calendar
Despite your heavy Discord usage, our event calendar is still finding some use. As long as it does, we'll continue offering the service as well, although it should probably not be the highest priority given your responses.
Meta
This year, we tried a new format for our survey and switched from Google Forms to LimeSurvey. We are happy to see that it has been well-received!
We hear your feedback regarding our 7-point Likert scales - we initially used this system based on scientific recommendations, but are increasingly annoyed by its sheer size, making the survey quite tedious to fill out (especially in our new survey tool). We stuck with them to keep surveys comparable throughout the years, but will recommend the new StV Head to abandon them next time.
Speaking of which: If you do want to find out more about the services and events mentioned, check out last year's report. It focused on "Events and Services" and has in-depth explanations on all of them.
Conclusion
Thank you for taking part in our survey, and thank you for your kind words. Representing you is a great joy and honour, and we are glad you appreciate our work!
If you are really unhappy with something we do or feel like there is something lacking, consider joining the team! We can't promise that all of your ideas can be implemented (looking at you, soccer tournament person), but we'll for sure try!
We plan to poll you again next year. If our report left something unclear, or if there is something pressing we need to get right, feel free to hit us up with feedback before that (either via informatik@oeh.jku.at or via Discord)!
See you in the new semester!
