This past Wednesday, our high school students spent much of their morning taking the PSAT, a standardized assessment intended, among other purposes, to prepare them for the SAT they may eventually take as part of the college admissions process.

I had a pit in my stomach that morning.

Part of what I was feeling was familiar. More than forty years ago, I sat for many of the same kinds of examinations. There was the PSAT, the SAT, and what were then called the College Board Achievement Tests, later known as SAT Subject Tests. Years later, when I applied to graduate school, there was the GRE. I remember the anxiety that accompanied those experiences, the sense that each examination might determine which opportunities would become available to me.

But what troubles me today is not simply the memory of that anxiety. It is how little I now believe those performances could have told anyone about the life I would go on to lead.

Looking back across four decades, I find it difficult to attribute much of what I consider meaningful in my life, professionally or personally, to how I performed on any of those examinations. The scores may have helped open certain doors. But they could not have predicted what I would do once I walked through them, the relationships I would develop, the judgments I would make, the opportunities I would pursue, or the ways I would respond when things didn't go as planned.

And now, as a Head of School, I find myself helping another generation prepare to sit for many of the same kinds of examinations.

I understand why. Standardized tests can provide useful evidence of academic preparation. They can help colleges evaluate applicants, and they have demonstrated some ability to predict academic performance in college. Parents rightly expect us to prepare their children for the opportunities and expectations they will encounter, whether or not we agree with every aspect of those expectations.

But there was another reason for my discomfort that morning, one that had less to do with my own memories than with the messages we send young people about what matters in their education.

At Magellan, we are an International Baccalaureate school. We speak often about the attributes of the IB Learner Profile: inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective. These attributes express an understanding of education that extends well beyond the acquisition of knowledge and the demonstration of academic proficiency. They describe qualities we hope young people will develop as they come to understand themselves, their relationships with others, and their responsibilities in the world.

And yet, here we were, devoting much of a school day to an examination that tells us relatively little about most of those attributes.

Colleges and universities continue to use standardized test scores in admissions, and some institutions have recently returned to requiring them. At a time when artificial intelligence is making it increasingly difficult to determine what a student's polished essay, project, or personal statement reveals about that student's own knowledge and abilities, assessments conducted under controlled conditions may appear more dependable. The reasons colleges have returned to testing are varied, but the desire for reliable evidence of individual academic performance is understandable.

Still, I wonder what our students make of the mixed messages.

We tell them that curiosity matters, that learning requires reflection, that intellectual risk-taking is valuable, that balance is important, and that becoming a thoughtful, caring, principled person is central to the purpose of their education. Then we ask them to devote hours to preparing for examinations whose scores may help determine which colleges will admit them.

The problem is not necessarily the examination itself. It is the significance we attach to it and what that significance communicates.

Young people learn about what adults value not only from what we say, but from what we ask them to do, what we measure, what we celebrate, and what we treat as consequential. When measures of performance receive more attention than the qualities of development we profess to value, we should not be surprised if students conclude that performance is what ultimately matters.

This raises a question I wish we asked more often: What formative value does the experience of assessment itself have for the young person taking it?

If the principal outcome of an assessment is a score that helps determine access to some future opportunity, we may have learned something about the student's performance. But have we helped the student learn something meaningful about themselves? Have we strengthened their capacity for reflection, judgment, agency, or self-understanding? Have we contributed to their development, or have we primarily measured and sorted them?

These questions point toward a distinction between two ways of understanding the purpose of schooling: education organized primarily around performance, and education understood as part of the larger process of human formation.

For generations, schools have operated largely within what we might call a performance paradigm. The organizing assumption is that the purpose of schooling is to help students acquire knowledge and skills, demonstrate mastery of them, and advance toward increasingly demanding academic expectations. We assess what students have learned, assign grades, award credentials, and use those records to make decisions about what opportunities should come next.

There are good reasons this model has endured. Knowledge matters. Mastery matters. Young people need to learn how to meet expectations, demonstrate competence, and persevere through difficult work. Parents understandably want assurance that their children are being prepared for the academic and professional opportunities that lie ahead.

For much of the twentieth century, schools and universities also occupied a privileged position in controlling access to knowledge, specialized training, professional credentials, and the opportunities those credentials made available. Academic performance became an important means of determining who would gain access. Grades, examinations, and transcripts provided institutions with ways to distinguish among applicants and decide who appeared prepared to advance.

There was a certain logic to this arrangement, even if it was never as equitable or as predictive as we might have wished.

But the world in which that arrangement developed is changing.

Knowledge and information are no longer scarce in the ways they once were. Artificial intelligence is accelerating that transformation, making it possible to produce work that previously required considerable knowledge, skill, or time. Credentials still matter, sometimes enormously, but the relationship between possessing a credential, demonstrating competence, and leading a consequential life is becoming more complicated.

The performance paradigm also carries an assumption worth examining: that what a young person can demonstrate at a particular moment is a sufficiently reliable indicator of what they have learned, how they are developing, and how well they are being prepared for the future.

That assumption has always had limitations. Two students can earn the same grade while demonstrating very different strengths and needs. A student can perform well without developing much curiosity or independence. Another can make remarkable progress while still falling short of an established standard.

And a test that helps predict how a student might perform during the first year of college tells us considerably less about how that student will navigate adulthood, exercise judgment, sustain relationships, discover a sense of purpose, or contribute to the lives of others.

The challenge is not that academic performance has ceased to matter. It is that performance has always been an incomplete measure of human development, and the changing world may be making that incompleteness more consequential.

A formation paradigm begins with a broader understanding of education's purpose. It sees schooling as part of the ongoing development of a person. Knowledge and skills remain essential, but learning also contributes to the development of judgment, agency, character, curiosity, relationships, interests, and an emerging understanding of self.

Formation asks not only what a student knows and can demonstrate, but what is developing in that student over time. How is the learner becoming more capable of making decisions, asking worthwhile questions, understanding other perspectives, responding to challenges, and directing their own learning?

The distinction is not between academic rigor and personal development. It is between treating demonstrated performance as the principal outcome of education and treating it as one important dimension of a larger developmental purpose.

In a formation paradigm, performance becomes evidence of development rather than the definition of it.

And once we make that distinction, the purpose of assessment begins to change.

Imagine an eighth-grade social studies class completing a unit on the American Revolution. Students have studied taxation and representation, British imperial policy, colonial resistance, and the competing perspectives of Patriots and Loyalists. Perhaps they have also considered the experiences of Indigenous people, enslaved people, and others whose interests complicate a simpler story of colonists resisting British rule.

At the end of the unit, the teacher gives a test. Some questions ask students to demonstrate factual knowledge. Others require them to interpret primary sources. The final section asks students to construct an argument about the causes of the Revolution and support it with evidence.

One student earns an 82.

That number tells us something. The student demonstrated much of the knowledge and skill the teacher expected but not all of it. The test has served a legitimate purpose, and the teacher may appropriately record the result.

In a performance paradigm, however, the assessment can easily terminate there. The student looks first at the grade, perhaps compares it with the grades of friends, calculates its effect on an average, and moves on to the next unit. Asked about the assessment that evening, the student is likely to report the same thing the gradebook reports: "I got an 82."

Now imagine another student in the same class who also earns an 82.

A closer look at the two assessments reveals something interesting. The first student possesses strong factual knowledge but tends to explain historical events as though they have single causes. Her essay is accurate but relatively simple. The second student has weaker factual recall but sees complexity everywhere. He notices tensions among sources and recognizes that different groups experienced the same events differently, but his written argument is poorly organized and incomplete.

The same score represents two quite different performances and, more importantly, two different learners with different developmental needs.

Now add a third student. She also understands the historical material well and has demonstrated that understanding repeatedly in discussion and in an earlier project. But she processes written information slowly and struggles to organize an argument under time pressure. Her score is a 72.

What, exactly, have we learned?

This is where assessment requires discipline. A test score is evidence, but evidence always requires interpretation. One principle I have found increasingly useful is that evidence should carry only the interpretive weight it can support.

The 72 is real. So are the two 82s. We should not explain them away simply because we know more about the students. But neither should we ask the numbers to tell us more than they can. If our third student's essay is weak, we need to determine what the weakness helps us understand. Is she struggling to interpret history? To construct an argument? To retrieve relevant information? To organize ideas quickly? To write under time pressure? Perhaps some combination of these?

The clearer we are about what we are trying to assess, the more useful the evidence becomes.

This is also why learner variability should not be treated primarily as an exception to an otherwise uniform system. Some differences among learners are associated with diagnosed disabilities and appropriately require specific accommodations or support. But human variability is much broader than disability. Learners vary in how they process information, sustain attention, retrieve knowledge, organize ideas, communicate understanding, take risks, respond to time pressure, work independently, and connect new ideas to what they already know.

Variability is not an interruption of teaching. It is one of the basic conditions of teaching.

That does not mean every student should always be permitted to demonstrate learning in whatever form feels most comfortable. Sometimes the form is part of what we need to know. Historians need to write. Mathematicians need to calculate and reason symbolically. Musicians need to perform. Language learners eventually need to speak the language. Struggling with a particular form can itself be an important part of development.

But we should know what we are looking at. An assessment does not simply reveal what a learner knows. It reveals what a learner can make visible under the particular conditions we have created for revealing it.

If speed matters to what we are assessing, then speed should matter. If it does not, we should be cautious about allowing speed to carry interpretive weight it cannot support.

Seen this way, attending to learner variability does not require lowering standards. It requires greater precision about them.

This distinction is worth keeping in mind when we consider the different standardized assessments our students encounter.

At Magellan, for example, we also use NWEA MAP assessments. Unlike the PSAT or SAT, which are designed in significant part to provide comparable measures of academic performance, MAP is designed to help educators understand a student's current achievement and learning needs.

MAP is adaptive at the level of individual questions. As a student responds, the assessment adjusts the difficulty of subsequent questions, allowing it to estimate achievement in relation to that learner's demonstrated knowledge and skills.

The digital SAT is also adaptive, but in a different way. Its difficulty adjusts between modules rather than from one question to the next. It remains primarily a standardized measure intended to produce scores that can be compared across test takers.

Consider a student who has not yet studied Algebra II. That student's performance on certain SAT mathematics questions may reflect limited exposure to the material rather than an inability to understand it. The score is still valid evidence of what the student could demonstrate on that assessment, but it should not be mistaken for a comprehensive measure of mathematical potential.

MAP, by contrast, can help identify more specifically where a student is in their mathematical learning and where instruction might productively go next.

This does not mean MAP is inherently good and the SAT inherently bad. Both have limitations, and neither tells us everything about a learner. Nor does MAP automatically become formative simply because it produces diagnostic information. Its educational value depends on what teachers and students do with the results.

But the distinction illustrates something important: an assessment designed primarily to compare and select students serves a different purpose from one designed to help us understand and support an individual learner's growth.

We should be thoughtful about both purposes, and especially about the messages we send students when we treat the resulting scores as though they mean the same thing.

Now return to our eighth-grade classroom.

Suppose the teacher hands back the assessments, students look at the grades, corrections are reviewed, and the class begins the next unit. The test has successfully recorded performance. It may even have given the teacher useful information about what students learned.

But much of its formative potential has been left unused.

Instead, imagine that students receive their assessments alongside something they wrote near the beginning of the unit. Perhaps they were asked then to explain why revolutions happen, or to offer an early interpretation of the conflict between Britain and its colonies. Now they have an opportunity to place that earlier thinking beside what they wrote on the test.

The teacher does not need to assign a lengthy reflection or create another rubric. A short conversation or period of examination may be enough. Students can look for what changed in their thinking, what became more complicated, what they now understand that they did not understand before, and where the assessment exposed something they still need to work on.

For one of our students who earned an 82, the important realization may be that historical events rarely have a single cause. For the other, it may be that sophisticated thinking loses much of its power if the writer cannot organize it clearly enough for someone else to follow. The student who earned a 72 may recognize that she understands the history better than the score alone suggests while also acknowledging that organizing an argument efficiently remains something she needs to develop.

The scores have not changed. The standards have not disappeared. What has changed is what the students are being asked to do with the evidence.

In a performance paradigm, the dominant question is How did I perform? In a formation paradigm, that question still matters, but it is no longer sufficient. The learner also begins to ask what the performance reveals about where they are, how they arrived there, and what might come next.

A young baseball player can go 0-for-3 and conclude, "I had a terrible game." That may be accurate as far as it goes. But a good coach helps the player see more. Were the swings late? Was the player chasing pitches outside the strike zone? Were two of the three at-bats actually well-hit balls caught by fielders? Is this one bad game or part of a pattern?

Similarly, a pianist can struggle through a recital without concluding, "I'm not a good musician." The performance matters, but its developmental value lies partly in learning how to interpret it. What happened under pressure? What preparation helped? What broke down? What has improved since the last performance?

A performance is a moment in time. Development is a journey across moments. Good assessment helps us see both.

That is why two students who arrive at the same level may have traveled very different distances to get there, while another may have grown substantially and still not yet meet the standard. Performance tells us something about where a learner is. Development tells us something about the journey. Neither should erase the other.

There is a danger, however, in extending this argument too far.

If conventional grades and tests provide an incomplete picture of a developing person, the answer is not to create an ever more comprehensive system for assessing the rest of the person. Schools can easily fall into this trap. Once we decide that creativity, resilience, collaboration, empathy, curiosity, agency, belonging, or purpose matters, we can create rubrics, competencies, scales, and dashboards to measure them.

The vocabulary changes, but the underlying assumption remains: if something matters, adults should assess it.

A formation paradigm should make us more cautious about that assumption, not less.

Not everything that has value needs to be assessed, at least not by the adults in school.

A child may draw because she loves drawing. A teenager may spend hours learning a song that will never appear on a transcript. A student may become fascinated by an obscure historical question that has nothing to do with an assignment. An athlete may stay after practice to help a younger player. A child may make something imperfect and love it anyway.

These experiences do not become more valuable because an adult evaluates them. Sometimes the appropriate response to something important is to notice it, talk about it, preserve it, or celebrate it. Sometimes we should simply allow it to matter.

This restraint may be particularly important at a time when so much of childhood is organized, supervised, documented, measured, and optimized by adults. If everything important becomes assessed, young people may learn a lesson we never intended to teach: things matter because someone else is evaluating them.

There is another possibility. Something may be worth assessing by the learner even when it does not need to be assessed by the school.

The student who stayed after practice might wonder whether he is becoming the kind of teammate he wants to be. The student learning another language might recognize that she is more willing to risk making mistakes in conversation than she was six months ago. The eighth grader who became fascinated by the Loyalist perspective might decide that curiosity led him somewhere the teacher never planned for the unit to go.

The school does not need a score for any of those things. Indeed, turning each into a score may undermine some of their value. The student's growing capacity to notice and interpret such experiences may matter far more than the school's ability to record them.

This points toward a larger developmental purpose for assessment.

When children are young, adults necessarily do much of the interpreting. We notice patterns children cannot yet see. We preserve work they would otherwise discard. We name strengths, identify misconceptions, and recognize changes that may be almost invisible to the child living through them.

As children grow, however, that relationship should change. What begins as "Here's what I notice about your work" can gradually become "What do you notice?" Eventually, the young person should be capable of adding something even more important: "Here's what I notice that you may not see."

The learner is no longer simply the object of assessment. The learner is becoming an interpreter of their own experience.

That does not mean adults disappear or that young people should simply trust whatever conclusions they reach about themselves. All of us can overestimate or underestimate our abilities. We rationalize weaknesses, overlook strengths, misread situations, and sometimes need another person to tell us something we would rather not hear. Teachers, parents, coaches, peers, and mentors remain important precisely because self-understanding develops in relationship with other people.

The goal is not independence from the judgment of others. It is developing the judgment necessary to know what to do with it.

A learner who develops that capacity can begin to distinguish between being stuck and making slow progress, between a strategy that needs more time and one that needs to change, between a disappointing performance and a lack of ability. Such a learner can also begin to decide when persistence is called for and when changing direction is the wiser choice.

This is where assessment becomes part of formation rather than simply the measurement of performance.

It is also where the IB Learner Profile becomes more than a set of attributes displayed on classroom walls or referenced in school communications. Reflection, inquiry, principled action, risk-taking, and balance are not simply qualities we hope to observe in students. They are capacities young people can gradually learn to exercise for themselves.

An increasingly reflective learner can interpret evidence of their own progress. An inquirer can recognize questions worth pursuing. A principled learner can make decisions that are not determined solely by external rewards. A balanced learner can begin to recognize when the pursuit of achievement is crowding out other important dimensions of life.

These are developmental accomplishments. They cannot be reduced to a test score, and they are not necessarily made more meaningful by assigning them one.

Schools will continue to give grades. Students will continue to take examinations. Colleges will continue to request transcripts and other evidence of academic preparation. Young people will encounter standards, rankings, auditions, interviews, and countless other moments in which someone else judges their performance.

We have a responsibility to prepare them for those experiences. But we should not confuse preparation for the next gatekeeper with preparation for life.

I think back to our students taking the PSAT, and to the teenager I was more than forty years ago, worrying about how I would perform on examinations that seemed to carry such significance.

I cannot know what lives our students will lead, which opportunities they will pursue, which challenges they will encounter, or what they will eventually consider their most meaningful accomplishments. Nor could anyone have known those things about me.

That uncertainty is not a failure of assessment. It is part of the nature of human development.

The purpose of education is not primarily to predict which young people will lead consequential lives. It is to help every young person develop the capacity to lead one.

Perhaps one of the best ways to determine whether our approach to assessment is changing, then, is not to look first at the report card. Listen instead to the students.

"How did I perform?" will remain an important question. A formation paradigm does not ask young people to stop caring about the answer. But over time, we should hear other questions joining it: What does this performance tell me about where I am? How did I get here? Where might I be heading? What should I do next?

Eventually, the questions become larger still. What am I learning about how I learn? What am I discovering that matters to me? What am I beginning to understand about myself?

The deepest change in assessment may not appear on a report card. We may hear it first in the questions young people learn to ask.

The test, the grade, the game, the recital, the project, the conversation – each gives us a glimpse. Each can tell us something, but none tells us everything. Our responsibility is to interpret those glimpses carefully without confusing them for the whole person, and gradually to help young people become increasingly thoughtful interpreters of their own developing lives.

We owe our students more than preparation for the next gatekeeper. We owe them an education that helps them understand which gates are worth walking through, what they hope to find on the other side, and what kind of person they want to become along the way.