Today's students enter engineering colleges with different technical backgrounds and prior graphics experience. This may due to their high school of provenience, which can be technical or non-technical. The prior experience affects students' ability in learning and hence their motivation and self-efficacy beliefs. This study intended to evaluate the role of prior high school graphics experience in first-year engineering students' self-efficacy beliefs in an introductory engineering graphics course. It also intended to evaluate the relationship between such freshmen's self-efficacy beliefs and their performance. Two assessment instruments were used in this study. The first is the eight-item Course Interest Survey (CIS) Confidence subscale, which was used to assess self-efficacy beliefs. The second is a multiple choice questionnaire designed on the course topics, which was used to assess performance. Ninety-nine students of the University of Brescia (Italy) participated in the experiment. Significant differences in self-efficacy were found between engineering freshmen from the technical high school versus engineering freshmen from the non-technical high school. A significant relationship between self-efficacy and performance was found only for engineering freshmen from the technical high school.