CCAL Assessment Garden

New Year’s, new me?  Why are our New Year’s resolutions so often so perfect and yet so ineffective? Perhaps because our resolutions aren’t rooted in reality and so there is simply too big a gap between where we are and where we want to end up.  Assessment Garden can make all the difference by providing individuals their actual starting point.

Assessment Garden is a software tool for students, faculty and staff that supports a person’s personal and professional growth and development. Offered by the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business (CCAL), it provides thirteen assessments available that cover a variety of topics including personality, work goals and ethical approach. By completing the assessments, people become aware of their strengths and challenges in a specific areas.

Simple to use, the assessments require the user to select the best multiple-choice response to a series of questions related to the topic under evaluation. For example, the GRIT- Passion and Perseverance assessment contains 12 questions, the first of which is “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.”  Responses – varying from strongly disagree to strongly agree – provide feedback about a person’s grit, passion, and perseverance, allowing them to better understand that aspect of their personality. 

Assessments allow for a person to become aware of themselves by reflecting on the results. This allows the individual to build on strengths and neutralize challenges. In addition, the individual can setup personal or professional goals based on these assessments that are objective and therefore attainable.

Caroline Macdonald, a fourth year human resources student, believes assessments are very valuable and encourages others to complete them.

“The assessments give me a chance to learn something new about myself, while, at the same time, being able to reflect back on my strengths and challenges that I already know about. While it may not tell me exactly how to make changes, the results I get give me a starting point,” said Macdonald.

Three notable assessments within Assessment Garden include Procrastination, GRIT – Passion and Perseverance, and the Ethical Approach Scale.  The Procrastination assessment allows individuals to understand the extent to which procrastination affects their lives. It also provides scientifically proven tips to reduce procrastination in daily life. The Procrastination survey is based on the work of Piers Steel, the Distinguished Research Chair for CCAL. The GRIT – Passion and Perseverance assessment helps individuals understand their drive, passion and perseverance towards achieving goals and is based on the work done by Angela Duckworth. The Ethical Approach Assessment is based on the research of Steel and CCAL Research Fellow David Dick.  It allows users to gain a more sophisticated understanding of what matters to them about ethics, their own ethics and how they respond to other people’s moral views.

The Haskayne School of Business has implemented assessments in various courses within the undergraduate and graduate degrees. Classes, such as Strategy and Global Management 217 and Human Resources 601, have assessments built in that provide students with an opportunity to learn about themselves in order to develop themselves both personally and professionally.

Assessment Garden is the first step to starting the Haskayne GPS™, which is available to all BComm and MBA students in Haskayne and is a leadership development tool. Students have access to Assessment Garden through the Haskayne GPS™ on D2L. 

By shedding light on your starting point, CCAL’s Assessment Garden might just be the “magic ingredient” to help you set realistic goals so as to make your New Year’s resolutions successful.