The Trap of the Fixed Point
The belief that a test can tell you who a person is on the very first day is a lie and we tell it to ourselves because we want the world to be simple and we want to put people into boxes where they stay put. We call it a baseline or a diagnostic or an intake assessment and we act like it is a neutral map of the mind but it is actually a trap that locks the door behind you before you even know where you are standing.
Systems love a fixed point because a fixed point is easy to track and it allows the computer to draw a line from where you started to where you ended but the computer does not know that your start was a fluke and it does not care that you were just having a bad morning.
My toe still throbs from where I kicked the corner of the heavy metal desk in the back of the library this morning and the pain makes it hard to be patient with anyone who wants to talk about the beauty of data and the logic of sorting. People who love metrics usually sit in chairs that do not have sharp corners and they do not have to look at the faces of the people they are sorting into piles of good and bad and developing and remedial.
I spend my days in a room full of books and men who have been labeled by systems and I know better than most that a label is just a way to stop looking at someone.
I was wrong for about how to run the library and I thought the intake test was the only way to keep the books safe and keep the peace. I thought if a man could not pass the basic reading check on his first day in the block then he did not deserve the heavy stuff and I steered him toward the picture books and the easy thrillers and I felt good about my efficiency.
I thought I was being a good librarian by meeting him where he was but I was really just keeping him where he started and I was letting a single moment of fear or confusion define his whole life in my room. I realized eventually that the men were not slow and they were just new to the lights and the noise and the way I looked at them and by the time they found their footing I had already decided they belonged in the shallow end.
The Red Light and the Timer
Idris sat in front of the screen and he felt his pulse in his neck while the clock counted down from and he had never seen a situational judgment test in his life. He is a good man and he wants to be a doctor and he has spent thousands of hours studying the way the body works and the way chemistry balances but none of that helped him when the webcam light turned red.
The prompt asked him what he would do if a coworker was stealing and he started to type and then he stopped because he wondered if they wanted the honest answer or the professional answer and the timer did not care about his inner debate. He stumbled through a sentence and he forgot to look at the lens and he looked like a man who was lying or a man who was confused and the system recorded it all.
The software saw his hesitation and recorded it as a lack of ability, rather than a thoughtful debate.
The software saw his hesitation and it saw his short sentences and it tagged him with the label of Developing and it never looked back. From that moment on the app treated Idris like he was a child who did not understand basic empathy and it gave him more of the same easy scenarios and it spoke to him in a voice that was too slow and too kind.
Idris learned how the test worked within of finishing that first attempt and he saw the tricks and he understood the rhythm but the machine was already convinced it knew his soul. It anchored his entire experience to that first cold stumble and it kept him in a loop of remedial content that he had already outgrown while he was still sitting in the chair.
We mistake a lack of familiarity for a lack of ability and we do it because it is the cheapest way to run a platform. It is hard to build a system that can watch a human grow in real time and it is much easier to take a snapshot and call it the truth and then build a whole world around that one frozen image.
The rational plan for learning always starts with a diagnostic because we think we need to know the starting line but the starting line is often just a person tripped up by the starter pistol. We are at our most fragile and our most ignorant in the of a new task and yet that is the moment the systems choose to decide our potential.
The math of the diagnostic is a cruel kind of logic that ignores the way humans actually work. We improve the most right at the start when we are figuring out the rules and the layout of the room and we are jumping across the gap between not knowing and knowing.
The Diagnostic Logic
Takes the tools away and gives you a lecture because you failed the pretend work before you knew what it was.
The Human Logic
Bombing at 10 AM, but being twice as good by noon if allowed to keep your hands on the tools.
A man might bomb a test at and be twice as good by if you just let him keep his hands on the tools but the systems do not let you keep your hands on the tools. They take the tools away and they give you a lecture instead and they tell you that you are not ready for the real work because you failed the pretend work before you knew what the pretend work was.
Chasing the Ghost of a Score
I see it with the pre-med students who come into the library to study and they are so afraid of their own scores that they stop being able to think. They have been told by every app and every prep course that their first score is a prophecy and they spend all their time trying to fix a past version of themselves.
They are chasing a ghost that the computer created and they do not realize that the ghost is just a shadow of their own nerves. They need a way to move past the label and they need a way to prove the machine wrong without having to pay a thousand dollars for the privilege of a second look.
You need a place where the score is a tool and not a cage and you need a system that understands that a human being is a moving target. If you are preparing for something as high stakes as a healthcare career then you cannot afford to be trapped by a software developer who thinks your first attempt is your only identity.
You need a platform like
where you can practice until the nerves go away and where you can see the feedback and then just keep going until the score matches the reality of who you are.
You should not be punished for being new to the format and you should not be steered into a corner because you took to find your voice.
Systems love the baseline because the baseline stays still but people are not meant to stay still and we are meant to evolve and to adapt and to outsmart the version of ourselves that existed . When we let a diagnostic decide the path then we are letting the past rule the future and we are making the mistake of thinking that the map is the same thing as the journey.
The journey is messy and it is full of stumbles and it is full of moments where we look like we do not know what we are doing but that is exactly when the most important work is happening.
“The system said he was remedial but the shelf said he was a master and I was the one who was wrong for believing the paper over the person.”
– The Librarian
I think about the man in my library who could not read the intake form and how he ended up being the one who fixed the broken shelf in the back because he saw the way the wood was leaning.
We have to stop trusting the first impression of a machine and we have to start giving ourselves the space to be bad at something until we are good at it.
The ink on the intake form builds a wall around the hand that held the pen.
If you want to beat the test then you have to refuse the label and you have to find a way to practice that doesn’t hold your first mistake against you . You need the freedom to fail and the freedom to try again and the freedom to prove that you are much more than a sixty-second video of a man who was just trying to find his chin in the camera window.
The only baseline that matters is the one you choose for yourself and the only direction that matters is forward.
