The Extremely Overconfident and Extremely Dissatisfied: A Case Study of an Introductory Macroeconomics College Course

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.