Thanks for the reply, and for responding so considerately to criticism! I think it’s a worthwhile data gathering activity, and personally would be very interested in more detailed, scientific, controlled and correlated data in this area, and I think there is LOTS of room in the domain for real research if you were thinking of doing it more.

Unfortunately, almost all data I’ve seen on this domain has very similar oversight or gaps and it makes it difficult to create actionable policy or even opinions without further research.

I wish you and your university well!

Your source methodology doesn’t share how you defined imposter syndrome to the subjective self-diagnosing survey group. Imposter syndrome by definition isn’t really something that you experience if you’re aware that you’re experiencing it.

They are first year college students. One isn’t expected to know anything.

In this circumstance; Identifying that they are extremely weak and need to study a ton and feel ignorant of CS and Programming is not imposter syndrome, it’s just accurate awareness of their current progress.

Your methodology also does not show the subjective, self identifying imposter’s performance against any kind of control group. If, for example, the surveyed persons performed highly relative to people who did NOT self-diagnose with the condition based on whatever your prompt was, then you may have a point. But if, however, they were poorly performing, then they didn’t have imposter syndrome… they are rightly worried and aware of their poor performance.

My criticism would be that this data, as presented, does not tell me anything about imposter syndrome, but rather only the confidence level of some surveyed people in their own performance/aptitude. This by itself is not enough data to assess imposter syndrome.

Their high school GPA feels like an extremely low corollary data point.