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Comment by dave333 | Hacker News Reader

The test is pretty easy to game just by giving answers you think make you a good prospect - traits you would aspire to but don't necessarily achieve. I too got a Mentor rating whereas in reality I am retired and much closer to a lazy shy procrastinating individual contributor who never gets anything done!

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This is a well-known problem with self-assessments in psychology in general. It isn't that hard for most people to choose to use a persona to provide answers to some quiz, even one quite divergent from their "real" personality (skipping the discussion on what that even is), and for some people with certain conditions it's almost impossible for them not to do this (e.g., the "Cluster B" disorders). Getting past this problem is the major task of creating a standardized assessment that has any value at all. You obviously can't just ask "Hey, are you a homicidal maniac who is unfit to stand trial?" but you also can't ask questions that are really quite obviously just that question in disguise like "If someone flips you off in public, do you think you're justified in immediately murdering them?"... and I exaggerate for effect, but the principle holds true.

I'd expect even in the case of this quiz if you told people to affect certain personas you'd find the results statistically-significantly shifted, even if the people involved couldn't tell you any rational reason why they changed their answers based on the persona they affected.

They tend to be not much past a slightly-more-sophisticated version of those idiotic ethics tests prospects for low-wage jobs sometimes have to go through.

“Gee, I wonder if ‘C. Let your friend have the goods for free, since they’re really struggling financially’ is the answer this retail store is looking for?”

I haven't looked at a corporate personality test since 2008, so this could be way out of date, but sometimes these tests have a trick question to catch people lying on the test. I'm not familiar with this test but some tests will ask something like "sometimes I feel tired" and if you answer "never" the test maker will conclude you are a liar since everyone is sometimes tired.

Im pretty sure the test being easy to game is the point. Theyre looking for someone who 1. Knows what the "right" answers are and 2. Is willing to give them whether or not they reflect reality.

Yeah you'd think everyone would save some time and treasure by just reducing the thing down to "Are you a jerk? Y/N"

...until I saw my boss's THREE HUNDRED page manual on how to interpret the results of these tests. There is apparently some entire industry behind these "tools". I've learned to limit my criticism of what is very clearly, to me, a load of weak-signal hogwash. They may as well throw chicken bones or read tea leaves from where I sit, but then again, I sit from a place of certainly smaller net worth than whoever is peddling this stuff, so round and round we go? :)

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