January 31

Today I did the assigned homework, which was to take The Emotional Competency Inventory. First of all, I noticed this lovely quote: "Participation in this study is completely voluntary, and you may opt out at any time by exiting your browser. Exiting will not affect your grades, status, or relationship with the University of Illinois." If the person taking this survey isn't taking it for a class, this is legit and applies. If you have to do this for homework, it's dumb. They had a box you could check so the people running the survey wouldn't use your responses, but I still think there's a better, less contradictory way to do this.


Before I could take the test, I had to edit my profile. I had already given them my name, major, college, ethnicity, and naming rights to my first born child, but they also needed my university identification number. I don't know why they didn't have us give this number to them in the first page of giving them information. I also don't know why an anonymous survey needs all of this information, but that's another matter entirely.


Already wary, I started taking the quiz. The format is that you grade yourself on various qualities that constitute emotion competency. If you think you're completely self-aware, you give yourself the highest on a scale of five. You could be completely wrong about this, it's quite easy to do, but according to this test, you're totally self-aware. To my mind, a better quiz would be situational and you'd pick a response. Honestly, the best test would be situational and you'd enter your response (or, you know, real life) but I don't expect that level of sophistication from this sort of test.

Hey!  I have high emotional self-awareness.  Probably.  I've even got accurate self-assessment.

At first, the statements that we were rating ourselves on weren't all that interesting. Then, I read this one: "I motivate others by arousing emotions". Oh my. They really should have picked a word besides arousing. My mind immediately goes to sex. I can't speak for everyone taking this class, but I try not to persuade people to do things because of sex.


Sex aside, the next statement that caught my eye took my mind in a different direction. "I offer feedback to improve another person's performance". Do you know that person who always tells you what you're doing wrong and what you should do instead? As nearly as I can tell, that's not me. This behavior seems bitchy to me, unless the person asked for feedback or you're in some sort of mentor-type position. Most college freshmen probably aren't on a day to day basis.


So maybe I think too snarkily (yes, that's totally a word), but I almost always try to disprove sweeping generalizations. Notice how I avoided making a generalization there? It's because of this tendency that I noticed this statement: "I believe I am among the most capable for a job". What job? I might be the best for something I know, but I would be a terrible person to put in charge of raising cattle. To my mind, if you think you're always the best person for every job, you have an ego that might be straining your back and you should get that checked out.


The last statement that caught my eye is a doozy. "I cut through red tape and bend the rules when necessary". I do this when the rules are dumb or not explained, but that's not the entire meaning of their statement. There are some rules that are a good idea. Their statement seems to advocate breaking any rule that gets in your way. Hey, if someone dishonors your family, you'd better hunt them down and kill them. Sure, there are laws against that sort of thing but, if you're going to complete your aim, it's necessary to break them. Don't you have high emotional competency?


One last note: they don't put periods at the end of their sentences. If you look back, all of the periods are outside of the quotation marks because I put them there. If they won't bother to have good grammar, should I bother answering their questions with anything but the same response each time?


Finally, finished with the inventory (that's a strange name that technically fits), I had to print it. Little did I know that my test results would take eight pages. Fortunately for me, my friend had already printed hers and adjusted my printer settings to print double sided and put two pages on each sheet of paper. To quote her opinion on the whole ordeal, "This is full of bullshit." I'm wondering if we'll even need to look at these results when I have class, or if this will be like the personal essay that we had to print for last week.