Getting Past the Know-It-All Stage

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Most of us have heard of this admonition, and it applies directly to engineering education. It turns out that people who know just a little about a subject greatly overestimate their understanding and abilities. "The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills" [5].