Academic Performance of Students and Difficulty of University Education

The paper is focused on two selected factors of university education, i.e. on the academic performance of students and on the difficulty of university studies. The target group consists of university students of distance form of study programme "Teaching of Practical Vocational Training" observed in the period of their three-year studies. The aim of the paper is: (1) to determine the level of academic performance of students in relation to the Gaussian distribution in each of the past five academic years in order to assess whether their studies are optimal, easy or difficult; (2) to find out the subjective degree of difficulty of studies in two academic years with an interval of five years; (3) to compare these two academic years from the perspective of subjective difficulty and achieved academic performance. The academic performance of students is represented by their grade point average for all the years of studies. The grade point average is then categorized into ECTS grading scale with the categories A, B, C, D and E. These categories are compared with the evaluation based on the Gaussian distribution in order to draw objective conclusions on the difficulty of university studies. The survey is completed by a questionnaire summarizing the subjective responses of students about the difficulty of their studies in the form of mode value of the given numerical scale. The results of the survey of the analysed target group showed that: the difficulty of studies through the academic performance of students over the past five years in comparison with the Gaussian distribution appeared to be low, however the difficulty of studies through the subjective evaluation of students seemed more likely to be high. This implies that subjectively the students evaluate the difficulty of their studies rather more critically than their achieved academic performance is.