Students' Preferences for Information About Their Test Performance: A Social Comparison Study¹

Abstract

College students received their test scores and letter grades for an actual examination and were asked to indicate their degree of interest in obtaining information (average score, highest score, etc.) in order to evaluate their performance. Overall, the students were most interested in knowing the average test score and least interested in knowing the lowest test score and the number of others who received worse test scores. There was some evidence supporting Festinger's unidirectional drive hypothesis in that most of the students were moderately interested in knowing how many others obtained better scores. Surprisingly, students who failed the examination displayed the greatest interest in the available information. There was little evidence suggesting defensive comparison on the part of low scorers. The results have implications for the self evaluation of ability, for social comparison research, and for educational practice.

Social comparison choices in the classroom: further evidence for students' upward comparison tendency and its beneficial impact on performance

“…The closeness and identi®cation ®ndings provide further evidence that participants did not nominate their comparison targets at random. All these observations are consistent with previous ®ndings indicating that people often prefer comparisons with people who are performing slightly better than themselves (Arrowood & Friend, 1969;Gruder, 1971;Nosanchuk & Erickson, 1985;Suls & Tesch, 1978;Wheeler, 1966;Wilson & Benner, 1971;Ybema & Buunk, 1993) and with whom they share a meaningful identity or a close emotional bond (e.g. Miller, 1984;Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1988).…”

A field study of social comparison processes in ability evaluation*

“…Downward comparison was not an important feature of information seeking in the students in this study. Suls & Tesch (1978) reported a similar lack of interest in worse-off others. Closer investigation of subjects' reasons for such lack of downward comparison would help to resolve whether students were avoiding embarrassment (Brickman c)r Bulman, 1977), or whether they did not anticipate that such information would be useful.…”

Theory and research concerning social comparisons of personal attributes.

“…As was noted earlier, many rankorder studies demonstrate that people tend to compare themselves with others whose scores are better than their own (Arrowood & Friend, 1969;Friend & Gilbert, 1973;Gruder, 1971;Samuel, 1973;Suls & Tesch, 1978;Thornton & Arrowood, 1966;Wheeler et al, 1969;Wheeler & Koestner, 1984). When comparing themselves with the extremes of the dimension, their first choice is the most positive extreme rather than the most negative (e.g.,, Arrowood & Friend, 1969), and even when they compare themselves with similar others, they compare themselves with those who are close but "above" them in the rank order rather than "below" them (e.g., Wheeler et al, 1969).…”

“…This interpretation of range seeking is consistent with evidence from studies that do not use the rank-order method. When subjects are not constrained to select a single score, they appear to be interested in obtaining any information they can about the dimension; they are interested in learning the group's mean (Sanders, 1982a;Suls & Tesch, 1978) or in examining the entire distribution of scores (Brickman & Berman, 1971), especially when they are uncertain about the dimension under evaluation (Brickman & Berman, 1971;Gruder et al, 1975). These results suggest that on unfamiliar dimensions, or on previously familiar dimensions in a new social context, one's goal is to learn the distribution of others' standings, perhaps as an initial step toward self-evaluation (cf.…”