Using self assessment to gauge a person's level of confidence

I remembered when I was a student at the University of Southern California (USC), my Economics Professor by the name of Dr. De Prano had a strange way of assessing students. He would asked the students to assess themselves by giving themselves a mark ranging from 1 to 100 with 100 being the highest score. If the student gives himself/herself a low mark, say for example a 60 out of 100, the Professor will ask you a relatively easy question. If you answer the question to his satisfaction, he will give you the full 60 marks that you asked for. Sounds fair enough? However, if the student asked for a higher mark, say 90 out of 100, the Professor will ask you a difficult question. If you answer it to his satisfaction, he will give you the 90 marks but if you answer the question incorrectly, you will get a zero (0)! Most students tend to play safe and gave themselves 60 to 70 marks.

However, I remembered there was a student, a rather cocky fellow I might add, joined our class and gave himself a 98 marks rating. We were all stunned. The Professor looked at  the student and gave him a question which I thought was not that difficult. As a matter a fact, it was comparable to a question worthy of 60 to 70 marks. I was curious as to why the Professor acted the way he did. After completing the course at the end of the semester, I bumped into the Economics Professor and commented about being “unfair” and “taken for a ride” by him when he gave a rather easy question to that particular student. The Professor looked at me and smiled. He said when you enter the real world, it is not just how you answer the question but people want to see how confident you are when you deliver that answer or giving that presentation! That cocky student was confident enough to give himself a high mark and managed to project himself in a very confident manner. I thought to myself that was a good was of assessing a person’s self confidence.

More than twenty years later, I became an assessor for the Mediation Skills Training Course at the Bar Council. My duty was to assess the candidate and to determine whether the candidate is suited to be an accredited Mediator with the Malaysian Mediation Centre (Bar Council). Immediately after the assessment, the candidate will normally ask, “How did I do?” Some of my colleagues will be rather polite and inform the candidate, “let’s wait for the result” or “you will know soon enough”. As for me, I will reframe by asking them, “What do you think?” or “how do you feel you did?” I wanted to see whether the candidate is  confident or sincere enough to give himself or herself a fair assessment. When a person becomes a professional Mediator, you have to be confident or at least must be seen to be confident by the parties. Giving yourself a self assessment is a good way of improving yourself. We are not perfect. We do make mistakes but what it is important is that you learned from it and move on. A final note that I wish to add here is that the question I posed to the candidate after the assessment has no bearing on their grade, it was merely to see their reaction, that’s all. I think it is better that I made it clear here in case some of the previous candidates or future candidates are reading this post!