Currently in Germany, well-established, state-controlled selection procedures for admitting potential students to university are being supported by changes in German legislation that allow universities to select students on their own. Universities favour this kind of autonomy that has the distinct advantage to select students who best fit to their courses and educational profile. However, performing selection procedures requires a lot of additional work, especially if the number of applicants is high. Therefore selection procedures have to be easy to conduct and efficient at attaining desired results. Developing these procedures for the Hamburg University of Technology requires consideration of a high amount of candidates from all over the world, bachelor and master degree courses being affected mainly. Inviting every potential student to Hamburg is simply not feasible.

For this reason the goal of the HEAP project is to develop selection procedures based on online assessment of candidates. We utilise this term not only for assessing potential students' performance during their studies with Web-based technology, but also for recruitment purposes. Performing an online assessment with candidates in the initial contact phase prior to a traditional paper based application, results in several benefits:

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• Reduce the number of written applications of students with little prospects
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• Challenge candidates otherwise not interested in the course or university
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• Increase the number of good candidates
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• Sharpen the university's educational profile
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• Gather statistics about candicate profiles. This may lead to the introduction of new courses
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Our role of the Telematics Institute is to develop, conduct, and evaluate one out of four software prototypes for online assessment driven by the above mentioned scenario. We are focusing on selecting candidates for the bachelor program Informationstechnologie of the TU Harburg. A prototypical assessment software is already developed by our institute and has proven effective for self-testing of candidates in the recent application period for our diploma courses.