Self-Evaluation ~ Turning Personal Skills into Academic Skills

The Current skills and qualities exercise includes specific skills which have more relevance to some courses than in others. For example, ‘selling’ is more relevant to marketing than to history.

The following exercise is an opportunity to map out your current skills in terms of the general (or 'generic') skills required for most academic courses, and to rate how well you already perform them. This will give you a better idea of how well you may cope with academic study.

Academic skills (skills used  in everyday life which  relate  to academic skills)	Self-rating 5 = good; 1 = very weak	Examples: Where or when you developed this  skill
e.g. Managing deadlines	4	Get children to school on time Got UCAS form in despite illness
1   Managing deadlines
2   Being self-motivated and  able to persevere with difficult tasks
3   Having the confidence to ‘have a go’ and  to express  my own ideas
4   Finding out information from different sources (research)
5   Reading  complicated texts or forms to find the gist of what  they are saying
6   Being able to select what  is relevant  from what  is irrelevant
7   Comparing different  opinions and  deciding what  are the best grounds for deciding who is right
8   Being able to weigh  up the ‘pros’ and  ‘cons’, the good points versus the bad
9   Writing things  in my own words
10   Being able to argue  my point of view, giving good reasons