The illusion of competence: why you feel ready for the exam but aren't

What is the illusion of competence?

While you study, you keep making quick judgements: "got it", "need to look at that again", "I'm ready". Psychologists call these judgements of learning. They decide what you study next and when you stop, so it matters a great deal whether they are right.

Koriat and Bjork (2005) pointed to a built-in problem. When you judge your learning, the answer is usually right there: on the page, on the back of the flashcard, in the slide you just read. In the exam, it isn't. If you fail to allow for the help the answer gave you, you get a sense of competence during study that turns out to be unwarranted at test. They called these illusions of competence.

A simple example: you read "the mitochondria produce ATP through oxidative phosphorylation" and think "yes, I know that". Seeing the sentence made the link feel obvious. The real question is whether "how do mitochondria produce ATP?" brings the answer to mind when nothing else is there. Those are different things, and your feeling tracks the first one.

Why does familiar material feel learned?

Because ease feels like knowledge. The second time you read a page, it goes down smoothly: the words are familiar and you can predict the next sentence. That smoothness, often called fluency, gets mistaken for memory. Our post on active recall vs re-reading covers the main experiments comparing the two methods. Here are three findings about the feeling itself:

• Rereading raises confidence, not memory. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who restudied a passage did better on a test five minutes later, but students who had been tested remembered substantially more after two days and a week. Repeated studying still increased students' confidence in their ability to remember the material.
• Cramming feels better than spacing. Kornell (2009) had people learn word pairs with flashcards. Spacing beat massing for 90% of participants, yet after the first session, 72% believed massing had been more effective.
• The feeling survives the evidence. Kornell and Bjork (2008) had people learn painters' styles from paintings shown either in a block per artist or mixed with other artists. Mixing worked better, but participants rated the blocked version as more effective, even after their own test results had shown the opposite. The authors note that massing seemed to create a sense of fluent learning.

The pattern is the same each time. The method that feels smooth wins on the in-the-moment judgement and loses on the delayed test.

How common is it among students?

Very. Karpicke, Butler and Roediger (2009) surveyed 177 college students about how they study. Rereading was by far the most listed strategy, named by 84% of students, and 55% said it was their number one strategy. Only 11% said they practised recalling information while studying, and only 1% made that their top strategy.

A second question asked what students would do after reading a textbook chapter once. 57% chose to go back and restudy it, and only 18% chose to test themselves. The authors propose that many students experience illusions of competence while studying, and that these illusions shape which strategies they choose.

So if you reread and feel ready, you are in the majority. The trouble is that the majority is relying on a signal that is known to be unreliable.

What does overconfidence cost you?

A wrong feeling of knowing leads to two expensive decisions.

You stop studying too early. If a topic feels done, you move on. In Karpicke and Roediger (2008), students' predictions of how much they would remember were uncorrelated with how much they actually remembered. A prediction that has nothing to do with the result is not a good basis for deciding you are finished.

You drop the wrong material. Kornell and Bjork (2008) studied students who were allowed to set aside flashcards they felt they knew. Being allowed to drop cards had small but consistently negative effects on learning. The authors trace this partly to shaky monitoring of what students really knew.

There is a third, quieter cost: you spend your time on what feels productive. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated rereading and highlighting as low-utility techniques and practice testing and distributed practice as high-utility, while noting that most students report rereading and highlighting. The illusion helps explain that mismatch.

How do you find out what you actually know?

You can't think your way out of the illusion, because it feels exactly like real knowledge from the inside. You have to measure. A few habits do most of the work:

1. Hide the answer before you judge. Cover the page, turn the card face down, close the slides. Only rate yourself on what you can produce with nothing in front of you.
2. Check later, not straight away. Right after reading, almost everything feels known, which is the five-minute result from Roediger and Karpicke (2006). Test yourself the next day, or at the start of your next session.
3. Mark strictly. "I would have got it" counts as wrong. So does a vague answer you fill in after seeing the right one.
4. Ask the question a different way. If you can only answer when it is worded exactly like your notes, you have learned the wording. Mix up the order and phrasing, or try questions on related material.
5. Let the result decide what you study next. The topics you missed get the next session. The topics you got right come back later anyway, so they stay tested.

Multiple-choice practice helps here too, but only if you are honest about why you got each one right. If you chose an answer because it looked familiar, that is the same illusion in a different form. Our post on why you get multiple-choice questions wrong covers how to spot that.

Practice questions made from your own files are a quick way to run this check. Ace turns your PDFs, slides or Word documents into practice questions written only from that material, so they cover what your course actually asks you to know, and you can pick the chapters you feel surest about. Under each answer it shows the sentence from your file that backs it, so when the feeling and the result disagree, you can see exactly what you missed.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Koriat, A., & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 187–194.
2. Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17(4), 471–479.
3. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
4. Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2008). Learning concepts and categories: Is spacing the "enemy of induction"? Psychological Science, 19(6), 585–592.
5. Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.
6. Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2008). Optimising self-regulated study: The benefits and costs of dropping flashcards. Memory, 16(2), 125–136.
7. Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.
8. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.