Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.

People are typically overly optimistic when evaluating the quality of their performance on social and intellectual tasks. In particular, poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. Five studies demonstrated that poor performers lack insight into their shortcomings even in real world settings and when given incentives to be accurate. An additional meta-analysis showed that it was lack of insight into their own errors (and not mistaken assessments of their peers) that led to overly optimistic estimates among poor performers. Along the way, these studies ruled out recent alternative accounts that have been proposed to explain why poor performers hold such positive impressions of their performance.

An important source of people's perceptions of their performance, and potential errors in those perceptions, are chronic views people hold regarding their abilities. In support of this observation, manipulating people's general views of their ability, or altering which view seemed most relevant to a task, changed performance estimates independently of any impact on actual performance. A final study extended this analysis to why women disproportionately avoid careers in science. Women performed equally to men on a science quiz, yet underestimated their performance because they thought less of their general scientific reasoning ability than did men. They, consequently, were more likely to refuse to enter a science competition.

Students' confidence in their academic abilities, measured with the Individual Learning Profile (ILP) scale, was examined in relation to their personality traits and grades. To validate the ILP, in Study 1, factor analysis of data from 3003 students extracted six factors (Reading and Writing, Hard IT, Numeracy, Time Management, Speaking, and Easy IT) with good internal reliability. Subsequently, in Study 2, 130 students completed the refined ILP, and scales measuring the Big Five, Perfectionism, Anxiety, and Self-Esteem. Between 10% and 31% of the variance in four ILP factors, but not IT skills, could be predicted by personality traits, but Self-Esteem and Anxiety were not influential. Higher conscientiousness and openness positively predicted higher confidence in reading and writing, while agreeableness and three aspects of perfectionism predicted confidence in numeracy skills. Being introvert and female were predictive of lower confidence in speaking, as were low conscientiousness and the perfectionistic desire to be organised. Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and the perfectionistic desire to be organised were strong predictors of confidence in time-management skills, which in turn predicted first year GPA. The reliability of the ILP was examined over the course of a one-year interval. When things get tough for students in Higher Education they need the self-belief that they can succeed, and the confidence to keep persevering, or else they may be more likely to give up. The beliefs that students hold about their academic abilities are important, but may be influenced not only by the student's true ability but also by their personality. While self-perceptions of academic competence have been investigated in children (cf. Kinard, 2001), little is known about how adult HE students perceive their academic strengths and weaknesses and whether these relate to personality. The current work seeks to address this gap. In 2001 the University of Wolverhampton introduced the Individual Learning Profile (ILP) questionnaire to first year students, in an attempt to identify students at risk of failure and enhance personal tutoring practices to build confidence and motivation. The ILP was broadly based on a questionnaire developed by De Montfort University to help examine why students underachieve, and asks questions about students' confidence in speaking and listening, reading and researching, time-management, IT Skills, numeracy skills, and writing. The current study was designed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the ILP as an instrument to measure students' perceived academic strengths and weaknesses. The influence of personality traits on students' perceived academic strengths and weaknesses (as measured by the ILP) will also be examined as perceptions of abilities can be biased. Ehrlinger and Dunning (2003) suggest that the general views held by people about their abilities, more than the task itself, influence how well people perceive they have performed. In their series of four studies, people with high opini...