Investigating the Determinants of Student Satisfaction in Public Administration Major Courses

This paper investigates various factors affecting university course satisfaction of students majoring in Public Administration. Data used in this analysis came from an online student course evaluation website operated by students at Korea University, which is different and separate from the official university course evaluation system. One of the unique features of this evaluation system is that students comment on the grade they received from courses, which enables us to control for ceteris paribus, potential effect of expected or received grade on the course satisfaction. This study used a total of 979 evaluations conducted for major courses offered in the spring and fall semesters of 2015 at the Department of Public Administration in Korea University. Ordinal logistic regression was used to analyze data with Likert-scale questionnaires and other various class characteristics. The primary results are as follows: good grades, a large sense of achievement, and small group classes lead to greater course satisfaction. In contrast, a large number of student in a class, longer class hours, and morning class reduce course satisfaction.