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A collaborative article of Patricia McCarthy, Scott Meier and Regina Rinderer, this article explores the idea of self-efficacy, or rather a student's perception of their own self-efficacy, in relation to writing competency at the college level.They explain that students who estimate their writing abilities and effectiveness to be quite high perform accordingly, and that this holds also for students who estimate their abilities to be quite low (the Pygmalion Effect in action). While this comes as a surprise to few, these authors further explain that of a few key factors, namely perceived self-efficacy, anxiety, locus of control, and cognitive processing methods, while all affect the quality of writing produced by students, self-efficacy proved to be the strongest predictor of student performance regardless of the other conditions in their studies. Students who become used to a process of accurate and frequent self-evaluation, both of the final product AND of their abilities separate from the product, may develop a more accurate and more proactive view of their writing competence and their later work may reflect this.