Testing whether you have them

Four checks you can run on yourself, none of which needs a grade. Read a difficult article and write its argument in five sentences without opening it again. Take something you wrote and cut a fifth of the words without losing meaning. Take a position you hold and write the strongest version of the opposite case. Take a statistic from the news and work out roughly whether it could be true.

If any of those is genuinely hard, that is useful information about where the next three years should go — and it is far more actionable than a transcript.