No it doesn't do that.
1) do not put stateful objects as instance variables in a spring bean(i.e @Controller). There is only a single instance of this class in the bean factory and doing that is not
thread safe. Things are going to get really ugly if multiple people start requesting this page.
2)When you call /printList it is a GET request. There is no data being posted in. Therefore spring is creating a new empty arraylist of Students for you. Go ahead and print it out you will see it is empty. Typically you would populate this list there possibly through repository call before returning the view.