Ask and Ye shall be Answered: expectations and perceptions of an MBA programme

Abstract

Asking students at the beginning of a course about their expectations of what that course should be like if it were to be a quality course is fraught with difficulty. As yet, the students have not undertaken the course and tend to express expectations which are derived from previous experience of other courses, over which the people responsible for the course concerned have no control. Issues relating to student expectations of quality are therefore problematic. Asking a question concerning the rating of excellence which the students would give an item creates, in the very asking of the question, an expectation that such an item will not only exist on the course, but that it will be of a demonstrable quality and is necessary for the course to be a quality one. The questionnaire then becomes a self‐fulfilling prophecy of the quality requirements of the course. The paper discusses the problems that arise in using questionnaires to explore student expectations.