I read this article titled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments while on David's page. Don't waste your time reading the whole thing. To summarize, they bring in a group of students and ask them how they think they are going to do in a set of tests. Of course all them say they will do better than average. The study tries to correlate the subject’s inability to evaluate their skills to incompetence. The authors never actually defined incompetence. My definition of incompetence is the inability to demonstrate proficiency of a subject in which a person is expected to possess adequate knowledge and experience. If the subjects in these cases were not prepared for their exams, how can they be expected to perform well? Their overestimation of performance is due to ignorance of the subject. When I graduated college. I thought I was an incredible programmer, better than most who were already in the industry. I would have ranked myself in the top 10% despite the fact that I had zero experience. When I first started working at GTE, I was arrogant. I had no clue how much I still had yet to learn. I still haven’t the foggiest idea what I yet need to learn, but I percieve myself as one of the top performers in my profession. Does that make me incompetent?