Work in progress — Do students know what they know?: Comparing self-assessments to exam performance

We report on the preliminary results from an on-going study of students' ability to gauge how well they are prepared for a particular exam by asking them to rate their preparedness in conjunction with the exam. The study is being conducted in two kinds of courses, an engineering ethics course with essay questions, and a Statics course with traditional problem solving. In the former case, students are asked to rate their confidence with what they wrote in response to the exam questions, and the latter case students are asked to rate their general preparedness before reading the questions. This study is motivated by the use of similar kinds of feedback from students for ABET accreditation where they are asked to rate how well they have mastered the ABET program outcomes in their respective programs. While ABET has gradually advised programs to de-emphasize such sources of evidence, the practice continues, and we felt that a study related to the validity of such student feedback would be useful to the accreditation process. Preliminary results indicate that students have a limited ability to predict how well they are prepared for or have performed on exams.