The extremely overconfident and extremely dissatisfied: a case study of an introductory macroeconomics college course

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I first provide additional evidence of the prevalence and severity of the problem of student grade overconfidence. I do so by documenting the level of overconfidence that exists in an introductory macroeconomics course. In this course, 75% of the 614 students earned a grade that was below what they expected. I also find that students who expect that their actual grade will fall significantly below their original expected grade are dramatically more likely to report that they had the worst overall experience in this course relative to their experiences in all other concurrent courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Grade overconfidence
• expected grade
• course satisfaction
• course experience

JEL CODES:

• A22
• I20
• I21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Table 4. Multinomial Logit Regressions for Overall Course Experience (D)

Notes

1 At multiple points in this paper, some of the students' expectations are described as ‘unrealistically high.’ This is to be interpreted in a probabilistic sense – given the student's observed actual grade, the probability that the student would have earned their stated expected grade was extremely low, ex ante. Specifically, in this paper, I am not trying to allocate all (if any) blame to the extremely overconfident students. There is a myriad of reasons why the student's eventual grade may have fallen significantly below their expected grade that was not the fault of the student. These include student-professor mismatch, professor inconsistency, and the student not being adequately prepared for the course, even having earned an excellent grade in the prerequisites for the course.

2 The appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviewed the research proposal and found that the research protocol was exempt from continuing IRB oversight as described in 45 CFR 46.104(d)(4). Under this type of exemption, the reviewing IRB also determined that consent was not required for this type of secondary research.

3 It might be worth noting here that some students are required to repeat the course if they failed it before; while others may repeat the course in an attempt to improve their grade for that particular course. Repeat students do not pose a challenge to the empirical model. Repeat students may be less likely to overconfident, but the first goal is simply to measure the overall level of overconfidence, regardless of whether students are first-time or repeat. The presence of repeat students is also unlikely to impact the validity of the second stage of the empirical model because in this stage, I measure the correlation between grade overconfidence and overall course experience without trying to establish causation or the nature of the causation, if one exists.

4 This high level of overconfidence late in the semester may be partially explained by self-attribution bias, where the students discount any negative feedback that they received earlier in the course about their grade. If this is true, then student overconfidence may not be as malleable as we may hope.

5 Table 3 reports results for all regressors.

6 The results for the ‘best course experience’ comparison category is presented in Table 4, later in this section. And in the interest of conciseness, the results for the other two comparison categories are presented in Table 5.5 and Table 5.6, in the Appendix.

7 In explaining why students view the course as producing their worst course experience, only three other regressors show up as significant at or below the 10% level. These are (1) the self-reported difficulty level of the course, (2) the student's major (economics relative to others), and (3) the student's preference for knowledge-based or effort-based grading. The results on these control variables, though interesting, are not the main focus of our discussion. As such, I provide a brief discussion of these in the appendix (5.B).