Start and end assessment

What is a start and end assessment?

It is the same measurement taken twice: once when the process begins and once when it ends. The client scores a set of areas at the start, those scores are kept, and at the end they score the very same ones again. The comparison shows what moved, how much, and where nothing changed.

It sounds obvious, and hardly anyone does it. Here is why it matters: progress gets forgotten. When someone improves little by little, their starting point fades away. Three months in, what used to be a 3 feels normal, and the client swears they are exactly where they started. The two numbers side by side bring the perspective back in a second.

What it is for in a coaching process

• Closing well. A closing session with no data leans on how the last day felt, and that can be good or bad for any reason at all.
• Handing the progress back to the client. More often than not they cannot see it until they look at it in numbers.
• Finding what did not move. An area that stayed flat after months of work is material for a conversation, not a failure.
• Giving the coach an honest reference. It is there to improve your own work, not only to show off results.
• Opening up what comes next. If something was left halfway it shows, and the next stage is born there naturally.

How to use it, step by step

1. Choose the areas at the start, not at the end. They have to be the ones from that client's process, not a generic list.
2. Score at the start and keep it. That snapshot is what gives meaning to everything else.
3. Do not show it during the process. If the client remembers their starting score, the next one comes out biased.
4. Score again at the closing session. Same scale, same areas.
5. Look at the comparison together. Let the client speak first, then you.
6. Ask about what did not move. That is usually the most useful part of the closing session.

How to read the result

• Even rises across the board usually point to a deep change rather than one isolated improvement: something shifted in how the client looks at things.
• A single area shooting up marks where the real work happened. It is worth naming what they did differently there.
• A flat area may mean it was never worked on, that it mattered less than it seemed, or that it is the next one.
• An area that goes down is not automatically a step backwards: very often the client now sees what they were not looking at before.
• Everything very high from the start means the scale was used badly or the areas were not really theirs.

Questions for the closing session

Common mistakes when using it

• Changing the areas between the start and the close. Then there is no comparison, there are two different snapshots.
• Showing the first score before the second. The client then scores against their memory, not against their present.
• Turning it into an exam for the coach. The number does not measure the coach, and treating it that way makes the client kind instead of honest.
• Stopping at the number. The figure opens the conversation; it does not replace it.

Frequently asked questions