Students' fallacies in predicting test outcomes

Tests are an integral part of any learning process. If students do not have sufficient information on tests’ content, they may have erroneous expectations and choose a suboptimal educational strategy, which leads both to a decrease in an overall level of knowledge and academic success, and a decrease in students' motivation to make efforts in future. Our objective is to identify the factors that shape expected and actual test scores and determine the differences between them. The data were collected through a survey of students of the Faculty of Economics of Lomonosov Moscow State University in the course “Theory of Finance” with a regression analysis as a modeling method. Students incorrectly assess their knowledge of the course, which leads to incorrect expectations. When forming expected grades for the tests, respondents focus on past achievements in other academic subjects, but no correlation between this factor and actual grades was found. At the same time, students do not consider past mistakes (the difference between actual and expected scores for the first paper) when forming expected scores for the next test.