Barder, Sam and Robbennolt, Jennifer K. Optimistic Overconfidence: A Study of Law Student Academic Predictions, U. Ill. L. Rev. Online 106, Jul 23, 2023. “Every fall, new law students arrive on campuses to begin their legal studies. They are by turns nervous and excited knowing they will spend the next three years studying and debating legal rules, learning how to “think like a lawyer,” taking exams, writing papers, and participating in moot court and legal clinics. They will sacrifice three years of potential earnings to earn their J.D. Many will take on (sometimes substantial) debt.1 Most will be hoping to find meaningful work as lawyers or in allied fields. Students interested in public interest positions will vie for a small number of highly coveted spots. Some students may hope to obtain a high-paying job in a profession in which starting salaries are bimodally distributed—with about half of post-graduate jobs paying between $45,000 and $75,000 per year and approximately 20% paying the market salary rate for “Big Law” firms (currently between $190,000 and $215,000). Some may hope to practice in a particular location or legal market. Students’ academic performance during law school is one key influence on these early career outcomes. Law school grades help determine who is considered and selected for many post-graduate positions. Academic performance matters, therefore, in determining whether students find the jobs they want following law school and how quickly they pay off their debt. How accurate are these new students’ expectations about how well they will perform academically in law school? A robust literature in psychology would suggest that they are likely to be optimistically overconfident, as humans tend to be. They may need to be highly confident to be willing to take the risk of enrolling. That optimism—even somewhat unrealistic optimism—might also be useful in helping them succeed. At the same time, there is some evidence that successful law students tend to be pessimistic and that a healthy dose of pessimism can be useful for practicing lawyers. This might suggest that law students are less prone to overconfidence than others. This paper explores optimistic overconfidence among law students. We surveyed more than 600 law students at the beginning of their first year of law school, asking for their predictions about how they would perform relative to their peers in their first year. We found that students were overconfident, with the vast majority predicting that their academic performance would be above the median and three-quarters predicting that they would finish in the top 30%. Students’ predictions, however, were unrelated to their ultimate first-year performance…”