 are usually seen in educational or

employment settings,

 they attempt to measure either how much

you know about a certain topic (i.e., your
achieved knowledge), such as mathematics
or spelling, or how much of a capacity you
have (i.e., your aptitude) to master material
in a particular area, such as mechanical
relationships.
 attempt to measure intelligence—that is,
basic ability to understand the world
around you, assimilate its functioning, and
apply this knowledge to enhance the
quality of life.

 Alfred Whitehead
 “it enables the individual to profit by error
without being slaughtered by it.”[1]
• Intelligence, therefore, is a measure of a potential,
not a measure of what you’ve learned (as in an
achievement test), and so it is supposed to be
independent of culture. The challenge is to design
a test that can actually be culture-free; most
intelligence tests fail in this area to some extent
for one reason or another.
 attempt to measure deficits in cognitive
functioning (i.e., your ability to think,
speak, reason, etc.) that may result from
some sort of brain damage, such as a stroke
or a brain injury.
 attempt to match your interests with the
interests of persons in known careers. The
logic here is that if the things that interest
you in life match up with, say, the things
that interest most school teachers, then
you might make a good school teacher
yourself.
 attempt to measure your basic personality
style and are most used in research or
forensic settings to help with clinical
diagnoses
Psychological tests were created for three main reasons, all of which
are interconnected:
 It’s easier to get information from tests than
by clinical interview.

 The information from tests is more

scientifically consistent than the
information from a clinical interview.

 It’s harder to get away with lying on a test

than in a clinical interview.
The overall problem with psychological tests concerns their ability to
measure what they are supposed to measure.
 The accuracy, or usefulness, of a test is
known as its validity.

 For example, suppose you wanted to

develop a test to determine which of
several job applicants would work well in a
bank. Would an arithmetic test be a valid
test of job success? Well, not if the job
required other skills, such as manual
dexterity or social skills.
 refers to the ability of a test to measure the
psychological construct, such as depression,
that it was designed to measure.

 One way this can be assessed is through the

test’s convergent or divergent validity, which
refers to whether a test can give results similar
to other tests of the same construct and
different from tests of different constructs.
 refers to the ability of a test to sample
adequately the broad range of elements
that compose a particular construct.
 refers to the ability of a test to predict
someone’s performance on something.
 For example, before actually using a test to
predict whether someone will be successful at
a particular job, you would first want to
determine whether persons already doing well
at that job (the criterion measure) also tend to
score high on your proposed test. If so, then
you know that the test scores are related to
the criterion.
 The ability of a test to give consistent results is
known as its reliability.

 For example, a mathematics test that asks you to

solve problems of progressive difficulty might be
very reliable because if you couldn’t do calculus
yesterday you probably won’t be able to do it
tomorrow or the next day. But a personality test
that asks ambiguous questions which you answer
just according to how you feel in the moment may
say one thing about you today and another thing
about you next month
 Internal Consistency Reliability
 refers to how well all the test items relate to
each other.

 Test-retest Reliability
 refers to how well results from one
administration of the test relate to results from
another administration of the same test at a
later time.
 Without reliability, there can be no validity.
▪ A thermometer, for example, may be a valid way to
measure temperature, but if the electronic
thermometer you are using has bad batteries and it
gives erratic (that is, unreliable) results, then its
reading is invalid until the batteries are changed.
 No psychological test is ever completely
valid or reliable because the human psyche
is just too complicated to know anything
about it with full confidence. That’s why
there can be such uncertainty about a case
even after extensive testing.
 Psychological test scores can be very useful
under the proper circumstances—and when
the limitations of psychological testing are
properly understood, respected, and made
plain.
 Note, however, that the score you get on any
psychological test is nothing more than “the
score you have gotten on that test.” Let’s say
you took an IQ test and got a score of 126.
Well, your IQ test score may be 126, as
measured by that test, at that time, under
those circumstances. But what is your real IQ?
Well, no one knows. And that’s a fact. So what
does an IQ test really measure? Well, again, no
one knows. And that’s another fact.
 Note also that every well-known and widely used psychological
test in the US was developed and standardized in English. This
might not seem very important, but just consider what
happens when someone needs to be tested who doesn’t speak
English fluently.
 Some test translations have been made and validated through
extensive scientific research. But if the test is translated
spontaneously into another language—either in print or
through a translator—all kinds of problems can occur. English
words with multiple meanings cannot be adequately
translated. English idioms cannot be expressed in another
language without changing the entire sentence structure along
with the underlying logic of the sentence—and when that
happens standardization, and the guarantee of fairness it
promises, is lost.
 So, even though translated versions of tests
might be used, and even though you might be
given a score that appears to be official and
scientific, that score is nothing more than “the
score you have gotten on that test” at that
particular time and under those particular
circumstances. This might not seem very
significant to some people, and it might even
seem like philosophical quibbling. But what if
your life depended on that score?
 to know the purpose of the testing;
 to know the names of, and rationales for, the
tests being used;
 to know the results of the testing (you even
have the right to read the psychological
report itself);
 to determine, through your
, who will have access to the
testing information (interview information,
raw scores, test reports) in your chart.