Grade Expectations: Rationality and Overconfidence

Abstract

Confidence and overconfidence are essential aspects of human nature, but measuring (over)confidence is not easy. Our approach is to consider students' forecasts of their exam grades. Part of a student's grade expectation is based on the student's previous academic achievements; what remains can be interpreted as (over)confidence. Our results are based on a sample of about 500 second-year undergraduate students enrolled in a statistics course in Moscow. The course contains three exams and each student produces a forecast for each of the three exams. Our models allow us to estimate overconfidence quantitatively. Using these models we find that students' expectations are not rational and that most students are overconfident, in agreement with the general literature. Less obvious is that overconfidence helps: given the same academic achievement students with larger confidence obtain higher exam grades. Female students are less overconfident than male students, their forecasts are more rational, and they are also faster learners in the sense that they adjust their expectations more rapidly.

Integrating Citizen Science with Online Biological Collections to Promote Species and Biodiversity Literacy in an Entomology Course

“…Because this assignment is built around students constructing species and biodiversity literacy over the semester, their anticipated grade reflects, in part, their competency in those areas. Although this overconfidence in evaluating their work is common, overconfidence can negatively affect both personal and academic development (Hall and Sverdlik 2016;Magnus and Peresetsky 2018;Deslauriers et al 2019). Closer examination of rubric scores revealed that the lower earned grade was mostly due to inaccurate identifications (at both the family and species level), sloppy citations of identification sources, and poor organization and curation of the collection (even a digital collection needs to be organized and curated properly) (Figure 2).…”

A Statistical Explanation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect

“…As a result of the procedure and the possibility of a bonus, the response rate was extremely high (97%). The idea of giving each student an incentive to express their opinion was successfully used earlier in experiments by Blackwell (2010) and Magnus and Peresetsky (2018).…”

Work harder or aim lower? Overconfidence and belief updating in the classroom

“…It has been shown that an overconfident student performs better than a student of equal ability that does not exhibit overconfidence. The argument is that such students will work harder in an attempt to fulfil their high expectations (c.f., Ballard and Johnson 2005; Johnson and Fowler 2011; Magnus and Peresetsky 2018).…”

“…(2017) show that beliefs about academic performance tend to persist. Magnus and Peresetsky (2018) showed that while there is persistence in overconfidence, women tend to learn and adjust more quickly than men.…”