# Assessments and Progress By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-05-27 We constantly take assessments in primary and secondary school to inform how we are doing. Are your math and reading skills aligned with the development schedule? If you are behind, your teachers may recommend a tutor or put you into a different course and development schedule. As children, we are not making any of these choices. We take the test, and others decide our fate. As you age, you might study more to control your destiny, or your parents may push you harder. But, in general, these tests and meta-tests (e.g., seeing if you study so you can remember random facts) decide your fate with little self-actualization. When we graduate and start a job, these assessments mostly stop. This can be a great shock for those who did well on these assessments. For those who did not, this can be a great relief. However, we've been trained and conditioned our entire childhood and young adult lives that these assessments control our fate. Unsurprisingly, we are obsessed with surveys that tell us what kind of people we are in our personal and professional lives. Corporate America loves a good survey to assess their employee's strengths and weaknesses and anything that ranks their internal and external performance. This is simply the status quo of today. The key question you might ask yourself is who creates these assessments and decides what the outcomes mean. Are they experts in their field? Can you check their credentials and beliefs? Does anybody do this? Think about the last assessment or survey you took. Do you know anything about the people who created it or the process they went through? If these assessments dictate our development schedule and mental frameworks, shouldn't we care where they came from? Assessments have great power in our society today. Progress will be hampered or accelerated by the questions we ask and the scores we give. #### Related Items [[Assessments]] [[Progress]] [[Education]] [[Status Quo]] [[Change]] [[Self-Actualization]] [[Life]]