When developing and designing student dashboards to inform and guide students through their learning processes, it is necessary to ensure that the solutions are based on the actual userneeds of the students. A survey conducted among first year Danish highschool students (n=339) asked students about 17 different data preferences, to understand what kind of data that supports students at their individual levels in terms of academic ambitions. This rich dataset tells us that students want informative data, that helps them filling out their knowledge gaps and perform better. They are less interested in comparative data, like clickstream data and time spent in digital systems, which is what is often being used in student dashboards as an indicator of engagement. The students also ask for a data interface which lets them communicate simple things back to their teacher, like asking for extra feedback or indicating that they are struggling with specific curriculum content. The survey also contained 14 questions concerning student ambitions and academic goals. This research proposes a quantitative method to calculate a score based on these questions, including issues about goal-setting, use of feedback and helpseeking behaviour among students. The score can ultimately be used to ensure development of data interfaces that support different student profiles in terms of their academic ambitions. It is proved that there are no correlation between this score based on data concerning academic ambitions and grade level. Thus this gives a new perspective on analyzing student ambitions and academic goals.