Alan JalilStructures POSITIONINGExisting structures
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What you know, and what you believe you know

Ten questions, one answer and one confidence mark for each, fifteen minutes. This questionnaire opens the five-day training on the assessment and rehabilitation of existing buildings and bridges, in reinforced concrete, in steel, and on road bridges. It is not marked, and it will not give you the answers: it tells the trainer where the group stands, and it shows you what you were holding as settled.

What this questionnaire measures

One thing, and the confidence mark is what carries it: the difference between what you do not know and what you believe you know. A gap you recognise is filled in ten minutes. A wrong idea held as certain resists the lecture, because it bends new information to fit itself instead of taking it in. That is the one to find before the week starts.

It measures neither your command of structural design nor your ability to run a project. Ten multiple-choice questions measure knowledge and representations, nothing else.

How to answer

One answer per question, and one confidence mark: sure, or a guess. Answer from what you would actually do on a project, not from what sounds correct, and mark a guess as a guess without hesitating. It costs nothing and it is the most useful information on the sheet. An answer can be changed as long as the questionnaire has not been handed in, since nothing here is timed.

With four options, answering at random gives one right answer in four, that is two and a half out of ten on average. Four out of ten does not stand apart from chance, and the closing report says so rather than congratulating you.

Every question carries a field where you can challenge the wording or explain your choice. That is not a courtesy: a badly written question is corrected by what participants say about it, and your remark travels with the record.

What becomes of your record

Nothing leaves your browser. At the end, a text box gathers your choices, your confidence marks and your challenges: you copy it and hand it to the trainer. Your answers stay stored on this device so that you can come back to the questionnaire, and the button that starts again erases them, after offering you the record to copy first.