Academic Overconfidence in the Millennial Undergraduate Student

The purpose of this research is to identify a correlation between Freshmen hopefulness and admittance to the Nursing program, and/or a correlation between Freshmen hopefulness and high school GPA. This can serve as a predictor for students that will excel in their academic degree of choice, and potentially as a predictor regarding retention of at-risk students with low confidence. We begin by looking at individual hopefulness using the State Hope Scale and comparing the two groups against one another. The first group evaluates hopefulness of Freshmen Pre-Nursing Majors versus the same students their Junior year that have been accepted to the Nursing program. Then, we compare the level of hopefulness for Freshmen Nursing Majors with the rest of the Freshmen population. The results yielded no correlation of hopefulness to academic performance between either of the groups. We discovered that this was consistent with the current trend of the inverse relationship of students in the United States having an increase in academic confidence with a decrease in academic scores when compared to students globally