Predicting course grades: Accurate for others but biased for self

People often are overly optimistic about their outcomes. To test such biases, students made judgments about their classmates' and their own likely performances in a course. Students estimated the grade distribution for the entire class by assigning a percentage to each possible grade and then estimated their own grades. I compared these predicted grade distributions with the actual grade distributions of past students. The grade distributions estimated for the class matched the actual grade distribution, but the distributions for the self were more optimistic. I have used the results to facilitate a class discussion of judgment biases and positive illusions.