Accessible summary People with learning disabilities often have cognitive assessments (IQ tests) carried out by psychologists. A cognitive assessment is a range of tests which help find out what people are good at and where they have difficulties. Five people who had been given a cognitive assessment by a psychologist were interviewed. They said it helped them to find out new things about themselves but they weren't sure why they had performed it. Psychologists could explain more to people about why they were doing a cognitive assessment and what would happen afterwards. Summary Researchers and clinicians have hypothesised that cognitive assessments have the power to influence the self‐identity of people with learning disabilities. This research aimed to explore the experience of a sample of people who had been given a cognitive assessment by a psychologist based in a team for people with learning disabilities. Five people who had undergone these assessments participated in semi‐structured interviews, and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyse the transcripts. The analysis identified that despite the participants not understanding the purpose of the assessment, they trusted the clinicians and felt they benefitted from the experience of doing the actual assessment. However, the term ‘learning disability’ was not used by the participants who also described experiencing little agency in the process, and being dependent on the actions of others for the assessment to bring about change.