The Framework › Personal
Confidence & Self-Efficacy
Distribution of responses
How institutions vary
Middle 80% of the 111 institutions with enough responses. Personal domain mean: 7.6.
Institution is a major factor here: weaker and stronger institutions are 3.4 points apart on this topic. Where a student studies shapes their experience more than the topic itself does.
What we ask
“I’m confident that I’ll succeed in my studies.”
What students say, and why
Self-criticism and feeling under-prepared on specific skills.
"I’m just extremely self-critical."
"I’m missing skills I still need to learn."
Doing, not just sitting; seeing how it works in the real world.
"I’m glad we don’t just sit still."
"They’ve told us roughly how it works in the real world."
Representative, de-identified comments from the lowest- and highest-scoring responses, translated where needed.
Related insights
What makes students speak up isn't class size. It's whether it's safe to be wrong.
Teacher interaction is the highest-rated experience students report: 9.1 out of 10, with 89% in the top band.
PatternExam confidence isn't a fixed trait. It cracks at exam time.
Exam confidence averages 6.7 out of 10, but it swings by roughly two points across the year and bottoms out at 5.4 during the spring exam window.
How we measure it
This is the topic-level average across its subtopics, on a 0-10 scale (higher is better), so an individual subtopic can score higher or lower than the topic shown here. Figures are scored responses from the last 12 months, mapped to the 2026 framework via the canonical question mapping; the cross-2020 figure on the Index uses the full response base. Movement compares the most recent six months with the prior six. Distribution bands: 0-4, >4-<8, 8-10. Cross-institution aggregate; no single institution identified; minimum group size applied.
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