Are better students really less overconfident? A preliminary test of different measures

In this work we use data from two sets of midterm exams and question-by-question evaluations of confidence levels and construct different indicators in order to study predictive ability and overconfidence. Our results show that (1) there is a significant evidence of a good ability of self-evaluation on the side of the best students; (2) worse metacognition does not seem to explain overconfidence. This suggests that different methods of investigating overconfidence might lead to results which are at least partially different from the ones discussed in the existing literature