The paper presents and analyses the attitudes of first-year university science and engineering students towards using paradoxes and counterexamples as a pedagogical strategy in teaching and learning of probability. The research question was to investigate the effectiveness of this pedagogical strategy from a student’s point of view. It is based on a parallel study conducted at two universities – one in New Zealand and the other in Germany. The vast majority of the students reported that they found the method of using paradoxes and counterexamples to be useful and effective.