Self-Assessment

There was a form I had to fill out at college, which asked you to self-assess various aspects of your nature.  They were:

Communication Skills, Team Work, Work Ethic, Technical Skills, Health and Safety.

What happened was this: at the end of every six week rotation in college, studying something like construction or wardrobe, your tutor would write up a report assessing what he or she thought of you in these various areas.  Fair enough.  Sometimes the report would be very useful, pointing out skills you might want to work on, or errors you hadn’t noticed yourself make.  Sometimes it was rather more inept, written by tutors who had barely seen you work and even if they had, couldn’t remember your name. And all the time, no matter what, you, as a student, had to fill out a copy of your own, explaining how you felt you’d done in these areas.  And the students, myself included, all loathed them.  The problem seemed to be that there was no way to win.  If, for example you wrote:

“Work Ethic: I believe I worked to the best of my ability and displayed a good attitude towards my work at all times.”  (You had to squeeze a minimum of 60 words out of each category, I hasten to add….)

Then the reply would be, “You think you worked hard, did you?  Perhaps your view of how hard you work is a rather naive one.  Perhaps you don’t realise how much harder you should work, how much harder you could work, how little you in fact worked at all!  What is this attitude problem you have here?”

Alternatively, you might put:

“Communication Skills:  I feel that I didn’t communicate at all well with my team.  We argued a lot and never understood what the other person was saying.”

Then of course the reply was: “Why do you think this about your communication skills?  I hope you’re not trying to impress us by being overly modest, because you’re really letting yourself down with this attitude you have.”

Now, let me at this point say that I am all up for a little self-reflection occasionally.  I keep a diary to this effect, and am, I think, a reasonable critic of my own affairs and genuinely try, even if I don’t always succeed, to take on board what other people say, and generally conduct myself in a way which, if nothing else, does no harm to others and potentially expands my skills and knowledge.  That at least, is the aspiration.  However, I am not a fan of taking this to silly levels.  Perfection would be an incredibly dull thing to meet in human nature, and arguably it’s the foibles in people that makes them endearing, interesting and unique.  No one can spend every single hour of the day being kind, generous, wise, learned and caring for kittens without going insane.  To put it bluntly, even the Pope farts in church after a dish of baked beans; that’s life.

Now, perhaps one or two people found these forms useful, but generally the pattern seemed to be that the people who were most receptive to changing themselves were invariably the ones who criticized themselves too harshly in their self-assessment, and actually had their confidence dashed by the need, the pressing need, to sit down and proclaim, ‘I did this, this and that wrong, and must try better’.  Simultaneously, the few people in my year who really needed a little self-reflection inevitably wrote glowing entries about themselves, and blithely dismissed the criticisms of others as prejudiced or ignorant.

I must admit, at its worst, the forms put me in mind of an (incredibly distant) echo of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when ‘enemies of the people’ were forced to write self-confessions laying out their sins to a judging crowd – a crowd specifically determined to be unimpressed, regardless of the content.  It was something that happened in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Russia, and while I am in no way comparing my time at college to any of these regimes in the slightest, as for the most part my time was superb and the pastoral care from my head of course was many times a live-saver, in this case you couldn’t help but think about the very easy shift that can happen between self-assessment, and self-humiliation.  Humanity is a proud species, and to be forced once every six weeks to sit down and say ‘I am wrong, I did this wrong, I am weak, I failed at that’ is a bitter, horrible pill for anyone, however strong, to swallow.  In a way, writing it down just made it worse, as a record was slowly accumulated in files of ‘I didn’t achieve’ and ‘I could not do’, scribbled over and discussed at length by your tutors as they picked apart every aspect of your soul in a secret, closed session held upon high.

The Catholic Church had one thing right, I think, when handling such matters.  Confession – which in a way this sort of academic soul-searching was – is hugely personal, hugely private, hugely difficult.  It is most honest, and most meaningful when held between two people who trust each other entirely, in full confidentiality and comprehension.  And to attempt to institutionalise self-reflection in such cold, formal terms, without understanding the human need for faith and understanding, seems like a cruel twist on one of mankind’s oldest and most difficult battles; that of knowing itself.