peer reviewed ; It is surprising to note the evolution of success rates in Belgian universities especially in the first year. Men are less successful than women and the differences are escalating in an alarming way (10, 21). Dropouts take the same direction (21) and women now represent a majority of the students at the university (10). In a previous study, we assessed 616 students in the first year at the university of Liège with Vasev (9), the English name of which was TASTE, a self report questionnaire constituted of 4 factors: anxiety, self confidence, procrastination and performance value; anxiety particularly concerned somatic expression of students before and during test evaluations; self confidence was a cognitive component close to self efficacy; procrastination was the behavioral component characterizing avoidance when students are confronted with the risk of failure; performance value referred to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. French validation of TASTE (23) led to an abbreviated version of 50 items (THEE) consisting of 5 factors, the four of TASTE and an additional one, very consistent, at first called depression because of its correlations with this dimension, then called sense of competence on account of its semantic content. Self-competence has been described in the literature of Achievement Motivation and corresponded to expectancy and ability beliefs in performance process which was also relService de Psychiatrie, Université de Liège, Belgique evant to self-efficacy except the particularity of comparison with others, which was not included in the last construct (33). Self-competence has been considered as an important part of the Worry component of test anxiety. Some authors didn't hesitate to view causality flowing from self-competence to test anxiety and have conceptualized the latter as a failure of the self where one's sense of competence has been undermined as a result of experienced failure (17). In our study, only that factor was equally scored in women and men whereas it was scored ...