Assuming an interdisciplinary approach, this inquiry adopts the framework of calibration from educational psychology to point out the relationship between the accuracy of graduate students’ metacognitive judgments and the quality of their texts. Within an authentic setting, the nature of metacognitive judgments is calibrated against the evaluation of rhetorical effectiveness by teacher raters employing genre analysis criteria. Findings display that individual differences in rhetorical effectiveness can be better grasped when accuracy of metacognitive judgments is regarded along two qualitative dimensions: depth and alignment. Differential achievement relates to the skill to apply genre knowledge to the text, and misalignments in task perceptions and criteria. Implications for genre pedagogy and further inquiry are debated.