Effects of Course, Gender, and Remediation on both Success Rate and Realism of Undergraduates on Pre-requisites Testing

Abstract

When entering higher education, students must become more autonomous in their learning, particularly know how to take stock of their ways of learning: identify what they know, and also what they do not know, then adapt their learning strategies. They must therefore develop metacognitive skills. This article analyzes the responses of 3830 newly arrived undergraduate students through a pre-requisites test including confidence levels. Focus is given on both their success rate, i.e., their achievement at the test, and their realism, i.e., if they were predictive in their confidence judgement. To compute a relevant realism index, previous work by Prosperi [1] is extended to our context. First, an expected course effect is observed: one of the seven proposed courses reveals a lower realism index, and at the same time, its success rate is lower too. Moreover, a gender impact is highlighted: females reach a higher realism index than males and this gap fluctuates over the 4 last years. This gender effect is probably different from the course effect because success rates of males and females remain equivalent, thus success rate and realism seem to be dissociated in this case. Finally, students who perform poorly on the pre-requisites test and choose to take a second session after a remediation period improve their results: both gaps of success rate and realism are closed. That could prove the relevance of the remediation, and/or the effect of metacognition feed-back provided just at the end of the pre-requisites test.