Abstract
When individuals make self-assessment errors, they are generally in the direction of overconfidence. Why do students overestimate their multiple-choice exam scores? Is there a way to boost students' exam performance to match their exam expectations? This study addresses these questions by a manipulation introduced at the end of multiple-choice exams. Students were given an opportunity to improve their score by answering an additional set of upgrade multiple-choice questions. Then the students could swap a subset of the questions with questions from the formal exam. Substitution credit was only given when a correctly answered upgrade question was swapped for an incorrectly answered exam question. The results reveal that the bonus opportunity significantly improves exam performance, and the adjusted scores are close enough to the estimated score that there is no statistically significant difference between the two. The authors believe that the substitution process activates critical thinking and metacognitive processes. It closes the gap between the students' estimated scores and the final exam scores. Finally, this activity gives students credit for knowing what they know and knowing what they do not know.