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Abstract: Choosing a course of study is the first challenge at the beginning of an academic career. Once the choice has been made, first-year students have to find their way in the new academic environment and meet the requirements of their field of study. At no other stage of study do so many students drop out. The main reasons for this include performance deficits and a lack of motivation. These, in turn, often stem from the fact that first-year students are surprised by the actual content of their studies. This can result in an overburdening and disappointing study situation. Many higher education institutions try to minimize this discrepancy between study expectations and study reality by offering prospective students online self-assessments (OSA) as an opportunity to intensively examine their desired field of study in advance. If higher education institutions offer such tools, evaluations should be implemented. Depending on the time point and the purpose of the evaluation, different evaluation approaches can be use. In this paper, we provide and critically reflect examples on how to design evaluations if – as in most cases – a direct link between the used OSA performance with administrative student data is not possible. The examples stem from the OSA at the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen (JLU). Firstly, building on data collected in the context of the annual freshmen survey at JLU, we report how many first-year students claimed to have used an OSA and how they rated it. Secondly, we present detailed user experiences and feedback reported by OSA users directly after using the tool. Thirdly, we illustrate an approach to collect data on user acceptance focused on the psychometric instruments used in OSA: study-related cognitive ability tests as well as questionnaires assessing personality – two examples for instruments typically used in the OSA context. We finally resume the conditions for a successful evaluation and derive recommendations for OSA evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]