The following questions ask you to provide your 90% confidence intervals. For example, if the question is "when did the first federal congress end?" you might say 1770 to 1800, if you know nothing about U.S. history; and 1790 to 1795, if you are a history buff; or even a range of specific days with time-of-say if you are a super history buff. (The correct answer for the adjournment of the first congress is March 3, 1791.)
Your goal is not to provide a range where you are 100% certain that the correct answer is inside your range, nor a range where you are only 50% certain that the correct answer is inside your range. Instead, if I ask you 100 such questions, then you should have the correct answer bracketed in 90 questions, and outside your confidence bracket in 10 questions. If you get 100 brackets right, you have failed just as if you get 50 brackets right.
Note that your knowledge is not what is being tested here: your ability to assess your own knowledge's accuracy is.
Answer 10 of the following questions (or, if you wish, answer 20). You can use free-form, because you will have to grade yourself when the answers are revealed:
Now score yourself. You should have gotten 90% of your answers right. If you answered 10 questions, you should have 9 correct answer ranges. If you answered 20 questions, you should have 18 correct answer ranges. If you have fewer correct answers, then you are overconfident.
On the quiz itself: if you got around half of your ranges wrong (instead of only 10%, as you should have), you are about as overconfident as the average rest of us. See the "capital budgeting advice" chapter for more detail.
