Like I have a bachelors degree in engineering. Is that intermediate or advanced? I feel like saying my science knowledge is anything beyond intermediate is a bit of an overstatement personally.
I have one in physics, but I have also taken a rather a lot (given the degree) in biology, chemistry, civil engineering, and electrical engineering. Went some places also not usual in math. And I've worked in IT since forever. There's a lot of stuff where I take a glance at it and realize I'm just looking at a single hull plate on a battleship.
What I am getting at is that if you have just intermediate knowledge in a bunch of places, I think it lends itself to sensing that you're just a paramecium stuck to the side of some N-dimensional construct. There's so much. I had a professor who was the expert in the second excited state of Helium-3. That was his thing. Just a single needle in the whale-sized blowfish of physics.
Each scientific field has specialised and become so dense with knowledge that even new graduates in that field would barely be classed as intermediate.
I didnt find out what standard they use, but personally I'd say intermediate sounds about right. I also have an engineering degree and while I know more than the average bear in many scientific disciplines I couldn't say that any of it is advanced.
I'm thinking of times where I went to the library to dig deeper on a topic and discovered a huge and complex topic just laying in wait.
[9]: Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y. & Rozin, P. Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 251–256 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3
(useful to note all those surveys are 2019 pre-pandemic, before there was severe partisanization of the phrase "trust in science". I wonder how hard it would be to construct a neutral methodology post-pandemic, now that even the basic vocabulary itself is loaded with associations.)
Intermediate knowledge of what's being tested, everyone is the most overconfident on subjects they have intermediate knowledge about.
If you test high school concepts then if you are shaky about high school concepts that applies to you. People who have no clue about high school and people who understand high school well will be less overconfident on that test.
Or if you talk about college algorithms, then that is the basis for intermediate knowledge. An average comp sci grad will be the most overconfident, a person who never studied algorithms and a person who teaches algorithms for years will be less overconfident on that test.
