Grade expectations: Rationality and overconfidence

Frontiers in Psychology. 2018. Vol. 8. P. 1–10.

Magnus J. R., Peresetsky A.

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 five hundred 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.  

Keywords: образование, education, gender differences, гендерные различия, рациональные ожидания, rational expectations, persistence, classroom experiment, overconfidence, самоуверенность, Behavioral education, эксперимент в классе, поведенческие аспекты в образовании, упорство