A failing grade for faculty: comparing faculty perception of student expectations and reality

When students begin a course, they generally enter with expectations of what will and will not happen. On the other hand, faculty members also enter a classroom with perceptions of what students expect from a course. Having a mismatch between these sets of expectations is natural, but can prove detrimental to learning. This paper compares results from a student survey of expectations, and a mirrored faculty survey of faculty perceptions of student expectations. The results section examines a survey of 286 instructors, and compares a subset of these from the University of Maryland's College of Computing, Mathematical and Natural Sciences to the expectations of 816 STEM students and 57 Computer Science (CS) students. Faculty fail to predict student expectations for various course elements, successfully approximating only 8 out of 22 elements for CS students, and 10 out of 22 elements for the aggregated students.