El-hadji Abdullah
Since self-appraisal is often questioned for its subjectivity, our main concern in this article is to study the reliability of self-assessment of higher education graduates’ competences with a different approach. This is to answer in particular, “to what extent self-assessment of graduates’ competences is reliable”, if reliability does exist therein. We used the data set of Reflex project which was carried out under the 6th framework programme of European Union. We employed ordered probit, OLS regression, parametric and nonparametric analyses of variance with the help of SPSS and Stata. Making use of some objective information along with the subjective one, we found nothing contradictory to our reliability hypothesis. We employed the parameters of coherence and consistency to our findings in order to draw conclusions. We feel confident to say that graduates’ self-assessment of competences is found to be, in Popperian terms, reliable to a modest extent. The fact that the respondents knew, at the time of survey, that they will not be harmed, could be regarded as a limitation to this study. We have explored only the acquired level of competences in this study. However, we suggest analysing assessment of required competence level of young knowledge workers in the labour market employing the same methodology (to the permissible extent) in order to delineate a comparative description; and this is what provides substance for our subsequent study.
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