“I wasn’t that good at it but I pretended to be”: Students’ Experiences of the Impostor Phenomenon in Academic Settings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The impostor phenomenon (IP) is an internalized feeling of fraudulence characterized by beliefs that one’s personal successes are due to external factors (e.g., luck) rather than internal attributes. Individuals who suffer from impostor feelings may feel that they are not really intelligent or capable but have instead fooled others. Written descriptions of IP experiences were provided by 879 graduate and undergraduate students and submitted to content analysis. Nine major themes were identified across three categories: causes (i.e., novel experiences, challenges, everyday academic interactions, and high expectations), feelings and impact (i.e., negative psychophysiological symptoms and negative thoughts and emotions), and management (i.e., negative, neutral, and positive). Implications for addressing these feelings in post-secondary settings are considered. Keywords: higher education; individual differences; stress/coping; content analysis; qualitative research Le phénomène de l'imposteur (PI) est un sentiment de fraude intériorisé, caractérisé par la conviction que les succès personnels sont dus à des facteurs externes (par exemple, la chance) plutôt qu'à des attributs internes. Les personnes qui souffrent du sentiment d'imposture peuvent avoir l'impression qu'elles ne sont pas vraiment intelligentes ou capables, mais qu'elles ont plutôt trompé les autres. Des descriptions écrites d'expériences de PI ont été fournies par 879 étudiants de premier et deuxième cycles et ont été soumises à une analyse de contenu. Neuf thèmes principaux ont été identifiés dans trois catégories : les causes (expériences nouvelles, défis, interactions académiques quotidiennes et attentes élevées), les sentiments et l'impact (symptômes psychophysiologiques négatifs, pensées et émotions négatives) et la gestion (négative, neutre et positive). Les implications de la prise en compte de ces sentiments dans le cadre de l'enseignement post-secondaire sont examinées. Mots clés : enseignement supérieur ; différences individuelles ; stress/capacités d’adaptation ; analyse de contenu ; recherche qualitative
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".