My four-year PhD journey has come to an end and made me realize that this would not have been possible without the tremendous support and encouragement from so many people. First, my most sincere gratitude goes to my main supervisor professor, Rolf Vegar Olsen. With a great balance between giving me the freedom and responsibility to shape my projects, and the continued support and guidance to reach my (sometimes far-fetched) goals, this has been an interesting, fun, challenging, and personally and professionally enriching journey. You have always provided academic guidance, and your support, encouragement, and constructive feedback on my work have been extremely valuable to me. I would also like to give my deepest thanks to my co-supervisor, professor Ove Edvard Hatlevik, whom I got halfway through. Your support, valuable comments, and engaging discussions have been immensely important to me. I am also grateful to my second co-supervisor, professor Ola Erstad, who introduced me to the core of the field and has offered his support and useful comments at various stages of my work. My heartfelt thanks go to professor Mark Wilson at the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Thank you so much for supporting my work and generously providing resources and collaborators for all my visits to Berkeley. I feel extremely lucky to have had the chance to work on such a novel assessment and to have been guided by you. I also want to thank David Torres Irribarra for applying for the Peder Saether Center grant with me. Daniel Stansfield, thank you so much for the initial introduction to the technicalities of the assessment software. I am infinitely grateful to my co-author and friend Ronny Scherer. You are indeed a great researcher, but for me also a role model in many ways. Thank you for increasing the quality of my work, for making me sweat and work hard, and for the many great laughs which made all the efforts worth it. Also a huge thanks goes to my co-authors Jo Tondeur, Inger Throndsen, and Perman Gochyeev for the collaboration, motivation, help, and discussions. Your support and generosity have meant a lot to me, and I feel fortunate to have had all of you as co-authors. I need to go a little back in time and thank
