AN ALTERNATE WAY TO THE MASTER'S DEGREE - EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF MASTER STUDENTS WITHOUT BACHELOR'S DEGREES

For more than 10 years the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany, has offered a distance learning program in computer science leading to the German academic degree Diplom-Informatiker (FH). This program has been a continuing education program, i.e. all students are required to have some professional experience before they start to study. The program was designed for career changers who already had a first academic degree in a discipline different from computer science. In 2007 we opened the program also for people without a first degree. Since then it has been possible for people with a professional background in computer science to enroll into our distance learning program after passing an admission test. In 2009 we switched from diploma to master's degree, and we kept the possibility to enroll into the program without a first academic degree. This means that it is now possible to get a masters degree without having a bachelors degree. This possibility of doing a master program without first academic degree does not exist all over Germany. Germany is divided into 16 federal states. As the federal states are responsible for education, there are different rules in different states. At present there are about 5 federal states which allow enrollments in master programs without a bachelors degree. Our state, Rhineland-Palatinate, is one of them. It should be emphasized that this rule holds only for master programs that belong to the continuing education sector; it does not hold for regular consecutive master programs. This paper presents our distance learning program in computer science and discusses our experience with different kinds of master students: those who have a first academic degree, and those who don't have such a degree. Are there any significant differences with respect to their performances? In order to answer this question we evaluated the marks of all exams within the last 4 years. We found no significant differences. There is a slight tendency that those students without a first academic degree perform even better. In our paper we speculate about reasons for the observed facts. Among other reasons we believe that many of the students without a bachelors degree are extremely motivated. This holds especially for those who were already enrolled in a program in their previous lives and failed. They consider this as failure in their curriculum vitae and want to remove this flaw. We conclude that the possibility of getting a masters degree without a bachelors degree in the continuing education sector is reasonable and worthwhile.