M.A. Empirical Democracy Studies: FAQs (worth reading)

From Bachelor to Master

It is possible, provided that you obtain a Bachelor's degree at Johannes Gutenberg University or at another German university, to be enrolled for one semester in both the Bachelor's and the Master's program. This provision is intended to enable you to begin your Master's studies even though not all the credits you have earned in the Bachelor's program have yet been credited and consequently the Bachelor's certificate is not yet available. It is not intended that you complete substantial work in the bachelor's program during your first semester in the master's program. The Master's program is a full degree program, so you have enough to do to fulfill all Master's requirements and no time to write a Bachelor's thesis on the fly.
Please note that you must submit your Bachelor's degree certificate to the Registrar's Office by the end of the 1st semester in the Master's program without being asked to do so; otherwise your admission to the Master's program will expire.
For applicants from abroad, the following applies: At the time of application, you must already have finished your studies in order to show your Bachelor's certificate (or proof of an equivalent first university degree).
If you have attended courses on statistics and the methods of empirical social research in your Bachelor's program and have acquired more than 6 but less than 14 credit points this way, then you have to pass the written exam "Statistics II" in the first two semesters of your Master's program. And this is worthwhile in any case: see Mainz Method Certificate!
And most likely you will manage it in the first attempt. If not, there are two retake possibilities. The 2nd retake option is only offered if necessary, i.e. if you really fail twice. However, this is extremely unlikely. However, if you really fail three times, your admission to the M. A. Empirical Democracy Studies will expire.
In detail: to prepare for the exam, you can attend the lecture "Statistics II", which, however, is only offered in the winter semester. Afterwards, you should take the written exam. If you do not pass the exam, you have the possibility to take the exam again at the end of the summer semester. And if, contrary to expectations, you should also fail, you will be given a second opportunity to repeat the exam before the end of the 2nd semester.

In the master

You can see which courses you can additionally attend under which conditions in Jogustine under "Additional courses in the M.A. Empirical Democracy Studies".

This is probably because you did not pay attention to the module context when you registered: Let's assume a module consists of a lecture and two seminars: they form the three building blocks of this module (lecture, seminar 1 and seminar 2). Although you can register for more than one event per module, you will only ever be admitted to ONE event PER module! This means: if you indicate several seminars when registering for seminar module 1 in module x, you will only be admitted to one of these seminars, regardless of the fact that there are still places available in the other seminars.
It is possible to participate in additional seminars within a module beyond the mandatory courses, provided that the module has not yet been successfully completed. A module is successfully completed when all study achievements (attendance of the courses, study achievements in the courses) have been achieved and the module examination has been successfully passed.

The "exercise" is now called "small group (Kleingruppe)" and can also be found right there in the annotated course catalog.

You must then present a medical certificate to the study office (your contact person is Ms. Dagmar McCaslin) in order to obtain an extension of the deadline. You can download the form here.

The colloquium is a mandatory part of the final module.

  • Here you have the opportunity to present your M.A. thesis, i.e. e.g. your research question and outline, method and theoretical foundation.
  • However, you may also attend more than one colloquium, for example to discuss questions and problems that arose during the writing process. The only requirement is that you register for all further colloquia as "Zusatzleistung".