Why Do Students Leave Your CS Program? A Free Evidence-Based Survey to Identify Causes of Attrition in Your Department

Computer science faculty are concerned with retaining students who are admitted into their postsecondary programs of study. Some students leave because their interests change, but others leave for structural reasons that could be addressed by faculty. For example, students may leave because of unbalanced workloads, poor social climate among students, assignments that seem to have no personal relevance, or other issues that can be remedied. An exit survey can give departments actionable evidence about what makes their students leave, including whether some groups of students are more likely to leave than others. Not only can a department benefit by routine formative evaluation, it can benefit by allowing students' voices to be heard, implicitly communicating care for students' experiences. In this paper, we introduce an evidence-driven exit survey that undergraduate computing departments can adapt to encourage feedback from CS leavers. We present our development methodology alongside proof-of-concept data to demonstrate the nature of results and the implications for a department that adopts this tool.