Self Assessment Among Hungarian Advanced Level Vocational Training Students

This paper is intended to clarify the phenomenon that lower achieving students tend to evaluate their own academic performance less accurately than those who do better in their studies. Previous studies have found that lower performers generally overestimate while higher performers underestimate their performance. The current study analyses self-assessment behaviour and efficiency among Hungarian higher vocational education students. The data collection took place at the Faculty of Economics and Business, and the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences and Environmental Management at the University of Debrecen. We have 4 hypotheses which are the following: H1: Lower performers generally overestimate their performance while high performers underestimate it. H2: Higher-achieving students evaluate their examination results more accurately than their lower achieving fellows. H2: Higher-achieving students tend to over-assess their examination results less than low-achieving students. H3: Compared to female students, male tend to overestimate their own performance more. We test our Hypothesis 1 with a comparison of the result in the four quantiles (Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4), Hypothesis 2 with a linear regression model, Hypothesis 3 with a binomial logistic regression model, and use a dummy variable (sex) for testing Hypothesis 4. We found that the lowest level of higher education students typically overestimate while the best performers (the best 25 percentage) underestimate their performance, similar to previous empirical studies. Our results also strengthen the empirical evidences from previous studies that showed: higher-achieving students evaluate their performance more accurately than their lower achieving fellows. Furthermore we found that higher-achieving students tend to over-assess their examination results to a lesser degree than low-achieving students. We also analysed the difference between the two genders. Compared to female students, males do not tend to overestimate their own academic performance more. This analysis provides new empirical results for the literature from a sample of Hungarian advanced level vocational training students.