Academic Progress of Foreign Students of Computer Science at Delft Univestiy ofTechnology

摘要

The following questions are central to this investigation: How do the results offoreign students at the Delft University of Technology compare with the results of Dutch students following the same study program. To what extent does the academic progress of foreign students at D.U.T. depend on their mastery of the Dutch language, and their previous knowledge of mathematics and physics. One way of answering these questions is to analyse the academic progress of foreign student during the preliminary phase of their education, and to look for relationships between academic progress variables, and person characteristics and entrance examination results. It was decided to conduct a pilot study in the Department of Computer Science first because of the ready availability of the relevant data for students in the Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Computer Science (a well organized administration system) and second because of the large numbers of foreign students in this Department. A control group of 57 Dutch students was selected randomly from the database of Student Administration. The members of the control group had recently completed the university stream at high school and began their study of Computer Science during the same time period as the foreign students, as for the foreign students, in a Dbase-III+-database. Personal information over the students, including final high school examination results for Dutch, Mathematics 1 or Mathematics B, and Physics, was included in the database.