Wow, this guy was right all along. Shame I dismissed his critical review… let’s just say that the exams are full of paper coding if you take the more technical tracks, which still have nothing to do with commercial programming and in no way prepare you to have a career, most of the teachers are old and prepare you to become a PhD student in the future instead of any practice, every exam is on paper even though business students can take some of their exams on computers (!!), there is no such thing as a ‘portfolio’ examination (so that every exam is written, oral exams are an extremely rare exception made if a course doesn’t have enough people taking it), i.e. hard work during the semester is mandatory just to be allowed to sit an exam, but doesn’t guarantee you even getting the lowest passing mark with some exams having 60% failure rate AFTER passing the hard mandatory group work (you can check the university website to see the examination statistics in German for yourself). My friends only passed 2 exams out of 5 last semester on the first attempt, despite cheating on one of them by copying the solution of somebody sitting in front. As for the city… of course, if you’re an international student, good luck finding any sort of accomodation in the city, it’s impossible to get an apartment (the only option is premium apartments around 1000 euros/mo like poha house and yugo, everything else is taken), borderline impossible to get a room without knowing German in Münster (every WG viewing has 30 local German students coming who are always preferred – not even exaggerating: my current WG had 100 applications within the first hour of posting the ad), and I was told by a guy who got a room in Studierendenwerk that he only got it because his mum had a friend who worked there, otherwise the queue doesn’t move at all and you have to know someone to get it (I haven’t gotten any room and it’s been a year now). Then, of course, the city’s public transport is really bad with the buses constantly going on strike (e.g. the bus takes an hour to take you where a bike would take 20 minutes), and the solution that they came up with is for you to take a bike in any weather (which is especially fun in winter) even if you live on the outskirts… there are no trams of course or anything of the sort except for unreliable buses. But really, none of the infrastructural problems of the city are that big of a deal, the biggest problem is the program itself, which appears to actively battle you for every single ECTS credit, which probably has to do with its prestige. If you think that, being a top student in your home country like me, you can overcome the difficulties of it, I would advise to think again, because you will be torturing yourself with cramming theoretical knowledge into your brain just to forget it after the exam which only – and I stress this again – ONLY prepares you to become a PhD student (e.g. reading random scientific papers which are only tangentially related to the field of Information Systems with the goal of being to be able to write scientific papers yourself in the future) and will not help you find a job at all in the commercial sector. The companies that come to the job fairs that the university organises only look for students with a C1 level of German as well, albeit it is possible to find a job in the city without knowing German, it’s much harder than in bigger cities, especially because of the fierce competition among international students. You should also be prepared to Google everything yourself, sometimes some professors will just throw a thousand-page book at you (happened three times a year to me) expecting you to read and understand every concept yourself and then discuss it in detail in class. Of course, you are also then expected to understand the exercises from the book and solve them without anybody’s help; most students end up googling the solutions, but even then many modules have the grade set to be 100% exam-based, and the exercises + group work that you did during the semester aren’t part of the grade at all. Even then, for the modules which are 50% exam-based, with the other 50% of the grade depending on the work that you did during the semester, it doesn’t get any easier at all since you’re still required to get at least 50% for the exam for the other half to count, effectively meaning that, if you’re only aiming for the passing grade, it doesn’t matter what grade you get for the work during the semester at all; the result being that a huge amount of students decide to freeload, making other people in groups do the work for them, which, for some reason, the university doesn’t punish them for at all. In my case, even after reporting a student for doing nothing all semester in our group to the professor, the student was still able to sit the exam and was not kicked from our group. Overall, I would say that the difficulty of the program isn’t justified, since it doesn’t provide you with any practical skills, but it could be interesting to somebody who wants to go into academia for some reason.
