Why Do Students Leave Your CS Program?

A Free Evidence-Based Survey to Identify Causes of Attrition

Are you concerned about retaining students in your undergraduate computing program? While some student attrition is natural, many students leave for structural reasons that your Computer Science (CS) department can address. Issues like unbalanced workloads, a poor social climate, or assignments lacking personal relevance are common, remediable factors driving student departures.

Our team has developed an exit survey for students who leave the CS major without graduating. This evidence-based tool allows you to identify specific pain points and determine if certain groups of students are disproportionately affected.

About the CS Leavers Exit Survey Tool

Easy to use 

• • Supports long-term data collection and analysis with minimal overhead required for management.
  • Adaptable to your specific department needs and institutional context
  • Reduces respondent burden by using an efficient branching structure to minimize irrelevant questions

Evidence based 

• • Thoroughly tested and refined through multiple iterations and piloting to ensure construct validity and exhaustive multiple-choice options.
  • Learn more about the evidence basis and development of the survey here: https://doi.org/10.1145/3724363.3729122

Beneficial for both the department and its students

• • Provides granular data to diagnose issues driving attrition and guide your efforts to increase student retention
  • Implicitly communicates care for students’ experiences by allowing their voices to be heard

Access the Tool

Click the download button below to download a zip file containing:

• Qualtrics Version: Campuses using Qualtrics can easily make a copy of the survey from the .QSF file and customize it to their needs.
• PDF Version: If you do not have access to Qualtrics, the survey is also available as a PDF.

Click here to preview the survey in Qualtrics.

Authors

Megan Englert, Mayce Miller, and Lecia Barker. 2025. Why Do Students Leave Your CS Program? A Free Evidence-Based Survey to Identify Causes of Attrition in Your Department. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2025), June 27-July 2, 2025, Nijmegen, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages.