For nearly two decades, assessment was something that happened to me and around me in real time. As a primary care paramedic and, later, a paramedic superintendent, I was evaluated on whether an airway was secured, whether a protocol was followed, and whether a patient was better or worse when I handed them over. Today I stand on the other side of that experience as a professor in a primary care paramedic college program in Ontario, responsible not for judging a single call but for designing how an entire cohort of future paramedics learns and demonstrates competence.
Assessment and evaluation saturate my current practice. My students encounter practical and clinical skills evaluations through objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) and high-fidelity scenarios, written examinations and quizzes, simulation-based assessment, and a growing emphasis on self and peer assessment, with the summative gate of provincial certification behind all of it. When I began this course, I assumed I understood assessment because I had survived so much of it. What I discovered is that surviving assessment and designing it for learning are entirely different competencies, and that much of what I carried forward from the field needed to be unlearned.
This paper traces that unlearning: the assumption that challenged me, the three ideas I interrogated most deeply, the equity and decolonial questions they forced me to confront, and the transformation I am now carrying into practice.