SeeDegree differs from conventional online tools that put students into boxes.

With SeeDegree you understand your students and their experiences from their perspective.

SeeDegree enables effective holistic advising. 

Saving you time, SeeDegree gathers meaningful interview-like information before you meet the student. Reports provide portraits of

individuals contextualized in your educational environment.

SeeDegree is customized and personalized. 

SeeDegree and its reports are customized both to individuals (student users) and your institution, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and what students find most important in their educational setting.

SeeDegree is easy, online, and efficient.

Save time; save money; know your students.

The science behind SeeDegree:

The SeeYes personal assessments are individually tailored and provide infographic feedback designed to reveal the distinctive strengths and needs of each person. Our approach is grounded in rigorous scientific psychological research that overcomes the limitations of trait-based assessments.

The SeeDegree Difference

You want to know about your students – the diverse, complex, and sometimes ‘quirky’ individuals whose self-concepts and life challenges can shape their educational success.

When your students complete traditional non-cognitive assessments, a quiz or survey, what information do you acquire? Scores on variables. You want to learn about student uniqueness, but instead you get scores on generic psychological variables devised by researchers who may never even have met any students like yours.

SeeDegree is different. We solve the problem of traditional assessments to give you the information you want. Your students follow a familiar procedure and take a survey, but this is a different type of survey with very different results. With SeeDegree you genuinely learn about your unique, individual students.

The Power of Idiographic Assessment

The SeeDegree system is the first software tool to fully incorporate scientific advances in idiographic assessment, specifically focused on the individual. Findings throughout psychological science demonstrate that assessment methods which target the unique features of individual persons – i.e., idiographic methods – provide dramatically more information than traditional assessments, which reducing complex individuals to generic test scores. Specifically, idiographic methods have three big advantages:

• Personalized Content: Individual people often have personal qualities, and face life challenges, that are not even represented on generic personality tests. SeeDegree’s idiographic assessments solve this problem by enabling test takers to ‘speak for themselves’: to voice, in their own words, their distinctive characteristics, goals, and obstacles to success. You see your students as they see themselves.
• Persons in Context: Traditional assessments tell you what people are like ‘on average’ in their daily life, but averages may not mean much. People live each day differently. Lives occur in context. Most people are anxious in some situations, calm in others, outgoing with some people, shy with others, motivated on some tasks, unmotivated on others. Idiographic assessments reveal these critical person-in-context variations. SeeDegree’s personalized reports show them to you.
• The Psychology Behind Scores. Traditional assessments provide little or no insight into the psychology behind test scores. A student may be low on ‘conscientiousness’, but why? What does that mean? Traditional test scores do not tell you why. Does that student lack self-management skills or just not care about their classes? Another student is ‘introverted’ in school activities. Why? Are they socially anxious, or does their social or ethnic background contribute to their feeling uncomfortable at your school? SeeDegree’s idiographic assessments reveal the ‘why’. SeeDegree treats students as experts about their own lives and reveals their insights into the personal qualities that are significant to their school success.

Social Cognitive Theory and Perceived Self-Efficacy

SeeDegree is built on one of the most systematically developed and scientifically successful framework in the recent history of psychological science: Social Cognitive Theory. Social Cognitive Theory treats people as agents: individuals with the power to reflect on themselves, plan their actions, motivate themselves, and thus shape the course of their development. SeeDegree assessments target the central variable of social cognitive theory – self-efficacy beliefs, that is, people’s subjective beliefs about their ability to cope successfully with specific life challenges. Research with large-scale school/educational databases reveals that self-efficacy beliefs are the singularly strongest predictor of academic success.

Statement About the SeeDegree Assessment Strategy: Bias, Diversity, & Inclusion

Contemporary educational institutions are diverse. Psychological assessments must respond to that diversity by avoiding two sources of bias that can cause individuals’ psychological qualities to be misrepresented. The SeeDegree team is aware of sources of bias, and we work with clients to formulate questions that are inclusive. This ensures that their application of the SeeDegree system assesses domains and life challenges that are representative of the diverse individuals who make up their organization. 

We circumvent the bias involved with psychological constructs:  

A psychologist may choose to measure a construct that is not culturally universal and, in so doing, misrepresent members of cultural groups for whom the construct does not apply. The “Big Five” personality trait constructs, for example, are measured in diverse populations despite their not replicating in multiple African and Asian languages and cultures. 

• We do not impose a fixed psychological construct on a population of individuals.  Instead, we let people “speak for themselves” by voicing their own beliefs about their personal qualities. 

We address bias issues surrounding survey item content.  

A given survey item may have different meaning to different individuals.  Consider an item measuring “Grit” (persistent effort and resilience to setbacks) that asks if “setbacks discourage” the test-taker. “Yes” responses are said to indicate a less resilient/“gritty” personality.  But they might instead indicate that the test-taker is experiencing external obstacles that are particularly discouraging (to anyone). 

For example, if members of underrepresented populations experience persistent socially imposed barriers to success that are not experienced by others and respond “yes” to the survey item, it would be a test-interpretation bias to claim that their response shows them to have “less grit.” What they have is the experience of social circumstances that are highly discouraging.  

• SeeDegree methods do not assess persons in isolation from the circumstances of their lives. Instead, our assessments ask students to map their personal qualities to daily-life challenges that are important to them. SeeDegree methods are inherently sensitive to personal qualities and life circumstances that may vary across social and cultural groups. 

“One of the projects I am developing in partnership with two fellow researchers in social cognitive theory concerns the assessment of academic self-efficacy of public high school students in the context of mathematics, reading, and writing. We are using SeeDegree as a methodological tool. This provides us with a holistic and contextualized view of the student, different from the general measures of self-efficacy. In addition to immediate feedback to students, the application can offer other specific customized information, which can help students, tutors, and managers.

The technical support we received from SeeYes Corporation has been essential for developing our research.”

-Roberto Iaochite, Associate Professor at the Department of Education at Sao Paulo State University – UNESP, Brazil