(Personalized) feedback drives progress

La pratique seule ne suffit pas

It is often said that “practice makes perfect”. Career Access had made a fine effort at adaptation by proposing its own version: "Perfect practice makes perfect results". But it had the disadvantage of not saying what makes a practice perfect. Because practice can mean repeating the same mistakes repeatedly, to the point of never improving. I suggested to the team that we revise our own version of the slogan.

We needed something short and effective. It also had to be something beautiful – so, as you may have noticed, that's (thankfully) not the title of this blog post. It was while pondering on how to come up with this great idea that I knew I'd nailed it. I could have worked on it for a long time. But the best way to find it was to ask myself if I was looking for it in the best possible way. If experience makes a work better, it's because it gives us the opportunity to see what works well and what doesn't work so well. So, it's not perfect practice that makes perfect results; it's perfect (i.e. personalized) feedback.

In some contexts, we know enough about the criteria for success or failure to be able to give ourselves valid feedback that will enable us to progress on our own. In other contexts, we have no idea, and by practicing, we run as much risk of reinforcing good reflexes as bad ones. That's why teaching exists. And the specific teaching that Career Access offers is mentoring.

A good mentor is a good assessor...

A good mentor is not there to flatter your ego, but to tell you exactly how it is. He's there to put himself in the shoes of those who will eventually evaluate your CASPer and MMI answers and to tell you what they will tell themselves. The more he can put himself in their shoes, the more you'll benefit. What increases the chances that he'll understand them well is the fact that he remembers his own performance on those admission tests, which was good enough to get him into the limited enrolment program he was aiming for.

... and a good self-evaluation teacher.

But his job doesn't stop at evaluating you and telling you honestly what he thinks of your performance to help you improve. You know what they say: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime!” Your mentor will also strive to help you develop self-assessment skills. Because we know – and encourage – that your preparation for the CASPer and MMI will not only take place during the mentoring period. To optimize your self-preparation, your mentor will give you tips on how to increase your ability to evaluate yourself. The more you integrate the criteria that your potential CASPer and MMI assessors will use, the better you'll be able to give yourself constructive feedback, and the better you'll be able to show how well you embody the principles of your target profession.

It's in judging that you become a judge

Do you know the French version of the expression "practice makes perfect"? If not, I'll save you the googling: "C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron". But there are no quotas (as far as I'm aware) for professional training programs leading to blacksmithing, so we'd have missed our target audience.

This being said, if we're not teaching our students to forge swords, we want to help them develop another type of weapon that's far more useful in the third millennium: their critical judgment. It's this judgment that applies in tests such as the CASPer and MMI, known as "situational judgment tests". Practising a profession is nothing more than judging what is the best thing to do in different situations – except that real life will bring you into far more diverse and crazy situations than CASPer and MMI!

Don’t worry: you don’t have to reach for the CASPer and MMI that famous "clinical judgment" so often referred to in healthcare training programs... forgetting that students haven't yet had any clinical opportunity to develop it! So it’s important to remember that CASPer and MMI will never place you in professional practice situations. But they will give you the opportunity to display principles essential to become, with the necessary training, a good professional.

Learn to show that you want to learn

The first of these principles is the awareness that, as professionals, you will remain in a learning position throughout your career. Firstly, because all professions that are accessed through limited enrolment programs will require mandatory continuing education; and secondly, because to do your job properly on a day-to-day basis, you'll need to keep abreast of the latest guidelines, new treatments, or case law. And so, the first skill you need to demonstrate is that you're capable of learning and willing to learn (remember, it's still a selection process for a school program!) You demonstrate this by proving that you're open to criticism and that you're also capable of self-criticism. You don’t know a thing about the topic of a question asked? Compensate by showing you're interested in learning more, instead of apologizing for not knowing enough. And show that you have a good game plan for learning more.

Above all, don't hesitate to go back over what you've said, explaining clearly why you've changed your mind, so that we can follow your thinking. Some people might be reluctant to seem uncertain in this way. This is the case, but it’s not necessarily negative. Being too certain of something false – let alone stubbornly asserting it so as not to appear lacking in conviction – would work much more against you.

And finally, don't be afraid to admit that you need help with your preparation, and do what it takes to get it. That's what Career Access is all about. Our mentors will show you the example of teachers in a constant learning process. (Ah! if all teachers in the education system could be like that...) They'll get you to practice situational judgment by judging you. They'll make you practice judging yourself in a situation of situational judgment. Their personalized feedback will help you make rapid progress... and make your other practices perfect.