The test took forty minutes. You sat in a room, and the room asked you questions, and the questions were not about what you knew but about what you understood: the difference between a thing you could repeat and a thing you could use, between a claim and the foundations that would hold it. The room made this distinction very precisely. Most people could not.
Mirn had administered this test three hundred and eleven times. She had watched people discover that what they thought they understood they had only memorized. She had watched them discover what they genuinely held and what had always been borrowed. Most people were not devastated. Most people were relieved, in the way you are relieved when something you suspected is finally confirmed.
She had never taken the test herself.
This was not unusual in the early years of the practice. The assessors had been trained on the same principles that generated the test, which meant they understood its architecture, which the designers believed made the test invalid for them. You could not be fairly assessed by a mechanism you had built.
In the sixth year, the researchers revised this position. They determined that architectural knowledge did not prevent genuine comprehension gaps from being detected. They sent a memo recommending that all senior assessors complete a voluntary self-assessment. Most of her colleagues had taken it in the months after the memo. Mirn had not.
She told herself it was because she was busy. Then she stopped telling herself anything about it and simply did not take it.
On the walk to her first appointment of the day, she thought about it again. What she was afraid of was not a failing score. What she was afraid of was a perfect one. She did not know what she would do with a result that left her nothing to question about herself. The work required something unresolved. She had always assumed there was something unresolved.
She had not tested herself.