A Comparison Of Self-Assessment Tendencies Of Full-Time And Part-Time University Students

Several studies in the existing literature of education research provide empirical evidences that low-achiever higher education students tend to predict and evaluate their own academic performance less accurately than those who perform better in their studies. Former papers have also supported that low-performers generally over-evaluate (both before and after examinations) while high-performers regularly underestimate their performance (or at least they are overestimating to a significantly lower extent). These findings highlight that less good skills and/or abilities are only a part of the low-achievers’ handicap. Another serious problem is that they are unaware about these problems (this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as ’Dunning–Krueger effect’). More information on this tendency is useful for both educators and researchers of education, because helping students who are facing this double challenge needs a better understanding of the processes and factors in the background. One of the information still missing from the literature is the results of testing and comparing the self-assessment patterns of students with different background. As a contribution to this area of research we measure the self-assessment differences between full-time and part-time business students. After a brief introduction and a short review of the empirical literature the current paper tests the above mentioned hypotheses on two small samples of full-time (N = 64) and part-time (N = 63) business students from the same course, university and majors. All the students wrote the same test type (multiple choice). Our main results support that in the cases of both the full-time and the part-time students the low-achievers showed a significantly greater mean overestimation. This was true for the pre- and also for the post-examination self-assessment. At the same time, self-assessment accuracy (measured indirectly via the absolute value of the self-assessment error) connected positively to the students’ test performance only in the case of part-time students. Moreover, performance and self-assessment accuracy showed a positive linear correlation in case of part-time, a negative linear correlation in the case of full-time students.