Psychology students' self-assessment of their professional skills: A Finnish case

The aim of this study was to investigate how reliably psychology students assessed their professional skills and knowledge. Participants consisted of 117 students and were from three groups, namely: beginners, intermediate and advanced. They were asked to evaluate their skills in different areas of psychology using a questionnaire. Their skills in describing psychologists' practice in two cases were also evaluated. The student groups differed in their self-assessed skills: the advanced student group got the best results in different areas of psychology while the group of beginners got less good results. The self-assessment of competence correlated significantly with the number of earned credits in psychology studies and points given by the teacher in problem-solving tasks. The challenge of training was that even after four years of studies, about 20% of the students were still at the level of lay helpers. The psychology students assessed their knowledge and skills very reliably. Additionally, the questionnaire turned out to be a good tool for feedback to develop the training of psychology.