Certificate of Initial Mastery

The Certificate of Mastery (CIM) was created by report "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages". The CIM has been called an outcome-based education diploma as it would be necessary to either receive or replace the high school diploma, and was characteristic of education reform legislation in many states such as Washington and Oregon.

The report called for the nation's workforce for the challenges of a new world economic order. The Report of the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce was published in June 1990 by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), led by Marc Tucker. This document was the basis for the education reform laws, standards and assessment systems created by many states and the federal government in the 1990s in the United States. It codified the principles of outcomes-based education reform, which later became standards-based education reform.