Self-Assessment: Definition, Explanation, & Tips

By Angela Saulsbery, M.A.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Have you ever wanted to get a better understanding of your personality, skills, and performance? Read on to learn how self-assessment could help you.
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You’ll probably be formally and informally evaluated by many people in the course of your education, career, relationships, healthcare, and perhaps hobbies. If you identify strongly with any of these performance areas, you may even tie others’ evaluations to your self-worth. For example, as a studious undergraduate, I based my self-esteem on grades and professor feedback. 
Learning the art of self-assessment helped me to step back from others’ assessments and standards by creating my own. If you struggle with feeling directionless or “not good enough,” self-assessment can help you identify your own standards, move toward them, and center your self-views on the opinion that matters most–your own.
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What Is Self-Assessment? (A Definition)

Self-assessment is the process of exploring and evaluating yourself (or your skills, abilities, traits, personality, or performance). Usually, when we self-assess, we’re measuring how we stack up against some standard. This standard can be institutional (e.g., course grades); we might also set our own standards or try to live up to someone else’s expectations. You can repeat self-assessments to track your progress over time.

Self-Assessment Types

Your self-assessment can be narrowly or broadly focused. Evaluating your performance on your last chemistry exam (and how you can do even better next time) is an example of a narrow self-assessment. As a broader self-assessment, you might try to describe and understand your entire personality and its many facets. I list additional types of self-assessment below.

  1. Life self-assessment: “Taking stock of your life” is a form of self-assessment. Especially if you’re dissatisfied with the way your life is going, you may choose a broad self-assessment to identify the source of your discontentment and possible steps to resolve it. If you want to assess your personality, the SAPA Project can give you your percentile scores on a variety of traits. Taking this test helped me narrow down areas for potential improvement.
  2. Career self-assessment: A career self-assessment can help you gain awareness of your strengths, goals, areas for improvement, interests, and workplace values.
  3. Ethics self-assessment: When I felt a little lost in my senior year of college, I conducted an ethics and values self-assessment to help me find a path forward. I first listed every recent situation when I’d felt content, happy, or proud of myself. Then I tried to identify where those feelings came from–why did I feel proud of myself when I finished a piece of writing? Why did surprising my friend with a bagel make me feel good? By distilling these incidents into 9 core values and ranking them, I created a map to a fulfilling life that has guided me through many tricky decisions and tough times since.
  4. Relationship self-assessment: If you’re struggling with relationships, you can compile a list of your values and needs in relationships. You might also assess the kind of relationship partner you typically are. This assessment can increase your confidence by giving you a good idea of what you bring to the table in a romantic relationship or friendship. It might also help you move on if a partner or friend isn’t a good fit, whether you or they ended the relationship. 
  5. Financial self-assessment: If you plan to retire by a certain age, or if you’re working toward a big purchase or a savings goal, a financial self-assessment could help. You can assess your income and income potential, areas of overspending, and investment choices. This information can point you toward changes that might help you reach your goals. 
  6. Health self-assessment: A health self-assessment could include test and exam results, issues that decrease your quality of life, goals, potential changes, and barriers to those changes. 
  7. Implicit bias self-assessment: To promote justice and equity in our communities, we need to evaluate how we might contribute to problems. For me, part of this process includes identifying my own biases and measuring their severity. A good reading list or discussion group can facilitate this process; you can also assess your level of implicit bias using Harvard’s Implicit Association Tests.

Why Might You Want to Do a Self-Assessment?

​Self-assessment can be a powerful tool to identify your goals, the resources you can use to achieve them, and possible barriers to progress. Self-assessment might also give you a satisfyingly detailed (and maybe quantitative) grasp of your skills, traits, and abilities. Later on, you can use these data to measure your progress and refine your strategies.

Self-Assessment as a Learning Strategy

Identifying your knowledge gaps and areas for improvement might speed up your learning. If you know where to focus your practice or studying time, you can use it more effectively. For example, in graduate school, I realized that I needed to improve my public speaking skills. I joined a public speaking club and quickly learned to speak off the cuff without all the “um”s and “uh”s. This training paid off in a successful job search. I suspect that less targeted practice would have left me in a worse, less confident (and less confident-appearing) position.

How to Do a Personal Self-Assessment

You can begin a personal self-assessment by deciding what you want to measure and how you’re going to measure it. For example, if you’re assessing a relationship, you might care most about quality time and the tone of your interactions. How will you accurately measure these variables? For example, you can measure quality time as the amount of time you spend with your partner on activities other than TV. You might also want to set a standard to compare your measurements to–maybe you want an hour of quality time with your partner each weekday evening, and you’re looking to see if the reality lines up with your ideal. 

Once you’ve collected your data, you can decide whether you’re satisfied with things as they are, or whether you’d like to improve or change something specific. If you’re not reaching your goals, why? Are there barriers that repeat? Underlying problems? How are your standards working for you? You can then take action based on these findings and assess whether these steps brought you the results you want.  

The video below suggests using the “wheel of life” to do a self-assessment. This wheel is divided into several categories, including finances, health, friendships, and physical environment. In each segment of the wheel, you can rate your satisfaction from 0 (terrible) to 10 (phenomenal). Dan Johnston (the video’s creator) recommends assigning extreme ratings to some of the segments–for example, choosing a 2 rating instead of a 5, or a 9 instead of a 7. He explains that this strategy will make your weak areas more obvious, perhaps boosting your motivation to work on them.

Video: The Wheel of Life: A Self-Assessment Tool

Self-Assessment for Students

In a sample of first-year medical students, self-assessment improved exam scores (Sharma et al., 2016). Here, students self-assessed by grading their own exams. Although self-grading does appear to enhance learning for at least one group of students, some researchers argue that self-assessment is beneficial only for rough drafts of projects–not for determining final grades (Andrade & Valtcheva, 2009). Unlike teacher-assigned grades, self-assessments might also develop students’ capacity for independent judgment (Andrade & Valtcheva, 2009).

Self-assessment can also improve students’ self-regulation, which includes the processes of setting goals, deciding how to achieve them, tracking progress, and flexibly adjusting plans as necessary (Andrade & Valtcheva, 2009). For music students, self-assessing videos of prior performances also enhances awareness of “what [they]’re doing and why” (Daniel, 2001)—much like my public speaking group made me more aware of the speed of my speech and my tendency to “um.”

For students who aren’t given the support they need to improve, however, self-assessment may not help or may even hurt their academic performance. Students with conditions that impact their schoolwork (for example, ADHD, dyslexia, or hearing loss) may become discouraged when they simply can’t make the changes they want to make without additional resources or outside intervention. Self-assessment may turn into self-criticism and instill hopelessness in these students. If you are a student who’s struggling and can’t seem to figure out why, I encourage you to advocate for yourself as strongly as you can. If you’re a teacher or other authority figure, please remember that self-assessment may not be a good fit for every student.

Self-Assessment for Employees

Professional self-assessments vary in their accuracy. If you have high self-esteem, you’re more likely to overestimate your performance (Lindeman et al., 1995). Men also tend to rate themselves more positively than women do (Lindeman et al., 1995)–a discrepancy that can disadvantage women when managers use self-assessments in promotion, hiring, and compensation decisions. You may also rate your performance and abilities more generously if you’re highly motivated (Lindeman et al., 1995). This behavior seems rational to me–if you enjoy your work and want to succeed, of course you’ll want to draw your boss’s attention to your strengths.

In some workplaces, performance reviews include a self-assessment. The video below includes tips for using this self-assessment to your advantage. Jennifer Brick, the career coach in the video, recommends using the self-assessment to “toot your own horn,” as managers sometimes base employee reviews on employees’ self-ratings.

Video: Self Evaluation | Performance Review Tips to Slay Your Self Assessment At Work

Self-Assessment for Teachers

Teacher self-assessment can galvanize “professional growth,” although some teachers may feel constrained by self-assessment tools that are premade and chosen for them (Ross & Bruce, 2007). For the best outcomes, self-assessment tools can be provided alongside coaching and feedback from peers and supervisors, as well as support for making desired changes (Ross & Bruce, 2007). ​

Self-Assessment Questions

Many lists of journaling prompts include questions that could add valuable information to your self-assessments. See below for examples of potential self-assessment questions.

  1. What do I need most right now?
  2. What are my three most important life goals? Goals for the next 5 years? Goals for the next 6 months?
  3. What values do I use to make decisions?
  4. What behaviors or personality traits cause me the most trouble?
  5. What kind of friend am I? What kind of partner am I? What do I look for in friends and partners, and have those criteria been working for me?
  6. What change to my health would improve my life the most?

Self-Assessment Journaling

Journaling can be a useful tool to add depth and detail to a self-assessment. Quantitative measures can tell us only so much, and there isn’t a scale or test for everything you might want to evaluate. You can journal in any way that feels most useful to you–digitally, on paper, with guided journals, with blank journals with space to doodle, etcetera. 

I recommend setting aside at least a couple of hours of uninterrupted quiet time per week to journal (although I’ve found even a few 15-minute sessions to be better than nothing). You may also want to consider privacy when choosing a format and storage space for your journal–I live only with a partner whom I trust, so I just flip my journal closed and leave it out on our desk. If you have nosy coworkers, roommates, or family members, however, you might want to use a password-protected phone app or store your journal in a less accessible place.

How to Do a Year-End Self-Assessment

An end-of-year self-assessment can pair well with any New Year’s resolutions you might have made at the beginning of the year. Some yearly planners, including Passion Planner (my favorite brand), contain a “yearly review.” In a yearly review, you can reflect on your progress toward New Year’s resolutions–if you fulfilled them, do you want to maintain your new habits or set a new, more ambitious goal? What resources helped you achieve your original goal? If you fell short, do you still agree with the original goal? Do you want to try again in the coming year? What blocked you from achieving the goal last year? A year-end self-assessment can also be a good place to remind yourself of all you did accomplish and experience in the past year, as well as any growth you’ve observed in yourself. ​

Articles Related to Self-Assessment

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:​​​​

Books Related to Self-Assessment​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Self-Assessment

Self-assessment is the “act of judging ourselves and making decisions about the next step” (Boud, 2013, p. 1). You can self-assess your personality, relationships, career, academic performance, health, and many other domains. Scales, worksheets, and journaling can be valuable tools in the art of self-assessment. With self-assessment, you can gather detailed and invaluable data to focus your learning, track your progress, and understand your resources. Although self-assessment can help you reach your goals, please remember that it may be only part of the solution for many issues. You might get the best results by combining self-assessment with the right outside support.

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