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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]

This paper examines the psychometric properties of a German version of the Conger-Kanungo Scale (CKS) of charismatic leadership, and compares charismatic leadership with the two leadership paradigms that have dominated theory and practice to date: the transformational/transactional paradigm and the consideration/initiating structure paradigm. An empirical study (N = 404) was conducted to explore aspects of reliability and validity of the CKS. In terms of construct validity, it was demonstrated that the translated instrument had adequate factorial validity. In addition, charismatic leadership measured in terms of the CKS showed convergent validity with respect to both transformational and transactional leadership and initiating structure, and divergent validity with respect to laissez-faire and consideration. In sum, the results contribute to leadership theory (e.g., comparing and contrasting several leadership theories) and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]