Please refer to the document below for the Committee on Test Standards' position on the sale of test materials and the test user's responsibility to the test publisher and to the British Psychological Society.

 Security of Test materials.pdf

The British Psychological Society's Psychological Testing Centre (PTC) operates a test review process whereby test publishers and developers voluntarily submit tests for independent review by reviewers and editors with expertise in the development/use of psychometric tests. The test reviews editorial team uses the EFPA review guidelines 

Enquirers who are interested in the quality assurance of psychological tests can also search the list of tests which have been awarded Registered Test status on the basis that they have met benchmark criteria for psychometric tests and instruments. These can be found at Test Registration

To date 144 tests have been submitted for review. Published reviews are posted on the PTC website and can be viewed in short summary or in full review format at Test Reviews

The Society cannot comment on the construction, use or quality of any tests which have not entered into its review or registration process.  However, we would recommend that before using any such test, users check for reviews in Buros or Tests in Print or other peer reviewed publications which are based on clear and transparent psychometric criteria, and that they check the information in the test's technical manual against the benchmarks for adequacy in the EFPA criteria.

The International Test Commission has produced a new set of guidelines

'A Test Taker's Guide to Technology-Based Testing'.

 Test Takers Guide to Technology Based Testing.pdf

In this section we will be providing a pdf of a randomly selected educational or occupational article from the current edition of Assessment & Development Matters (ADM)

The article selected from the Summer 2011 edition is ' Gullibility and psychometrics: Do people just believe what you tell them ?'  by David Biggs and Laura Hunt.

 Gullibility and Psychometrics.pdf

ADM is mailed out quarterly to all qualified test users with a current annual entry on the Register of Qualifications in Test Use (RQTU).

Alternatively, e-copies of  ADM can be purchased through the BPS Shop

Look out for our  next posting from the autumn edition of ADM at the end of September 2011.

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Available to all Register members

In March 2009 we re-launched our member magazine. It is now Assessment & Development Matters.
Focusing on assessment & development in the educational and occupational fields this practitioner-focused magazine aims to deliver the latest information on testing matters.

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People with more conscientious personalities, who have greater ambition and discipline, live longer. That's according to Margaret Kern and Howard Friedman who combined data on this topic from over 20 previous studies, involving more than 8,900 participants in the United States, Canada, Germany, Norway, Japan and Sweden - many of whom had illnesses like heart disease or cancer.

On average, people who scored higher on measures of conscientiousness (agreeing, for example, with statements like "I plan ahead" and disagreeing with statements like "My house is a mess") tended to live between two and four years longer than low scorers.

This influence of conscientiousness on longevity was found to be as large or larger than many better known factors affecting longevity, such as socio-economic status.

Among the sub-factors of conscientiousness, it was ambition and discipline that were particularly important for longevity, whereas responsibility and self-control were less important.

Past research has shown that people who are more conscientious are less likely to drink or smoke heavily but health behaviours aren't the whole story. For example, a previous study by the same research team found that conscientiousness measured in childhood predicted longevity over a 70-year period, regardless of whether the cause of death was health-related or not.

Kern said it's possible that as well as affecting health behaviours, conscientiousness also influences the kind of people we end up mixing with and the situations we find ourselves in.

The researchers said that personality factors are too often ignored in a medical context and that their findings could one day have practical implications. "There is some evidence that people can become more conscientious, especially as they enter stable jobs or good marriages," Kern said. "We think our findings can challenge people to think about their lives and what may result from the actions they do. Even though conscientiousness cannot be changed in the short term, improvements can emerge over the long run as individuals enter responsible relationships, careers, and associations."

This article originally appeared in the Research Digest.

Margaret L. Kern, Howard S. Friedman (2008). Do conscientious individuals live longer? A quantitative review. Health Psychology, 27 (5), 505-512.

Author weblink

Research Digest

Aspects of personality can be even more important than IQ when it comes to predicting workplace performance and academic success. If you're conscientious and emotionally stable, you're likely to be a better employee or a more successful student than someone who is lazy and unstable. The trouble for university selectors or company recruiters is that personality tests can be easily faked...until now. Psychologists in Canada think they've found a way to measure the Big Five factors of personality that is less vulnerable to faking.

Jacob Hirsh and Jordan Paterson asked 205 undergrads to complete both the standard Big Five Inventory and their newly designed "relative-scored" personality questionnaire.

The new test taps into the Big Five factors of personality but instead of asking respondents to rate how highly they agree with a set of descriptions about themselves, it forces them to choose between pairs of competing statements. For example, a participant might have to choose between "I rarely get irritated" versus "I am full of ideas". This means participants can't paint themselves as all round wonder candidates, they have to sacrifice some positive attributes at the expense of others.

Crucially, half the students were asked to complete the tests honestly, while the other half were asked to fake them - as if they were trying to present the best impression possible.

When the tests were answered honestly, both of them predicted the participants' final school exam performance (their "grade point average") and their self-reported creative achievements. However, when the tests were deliberately faked, only scores on the newly designed test predicted exam and creative success.

"The massive variability in productivity typically obtaining between individuals means that even the moderate improvements in predictive validity potentially gained from the new questionnaire could have large economic benefits when used in real world selection procedures," the researchers said.

The new test also provides some intriguing clues about people's faking strategies. It showed that students tended to sacrifice their scores on agreeableness in order to present themselves as more conscientious. The researchers plan to test whether this will change in different circumstances or with different participants.

Reference: J HIRSH, J PETERSON (2008). Predicting creativity and academic success with a "Fake-Proof" measure of the Big Five Journal of Research in Personality, 42 (5), 1323-1333 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2008.04.006

This article first appeared in the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog

Worth a look

The Research Digest is provided by the British Psychological Society and is delivered free to your inbox fortnightly - you just need to sign up. You can browse posts by category, look at psychology related jobs, listen to pod casts, plus lots more.

A CIPD survey, reports that 25% of organisations surveyed made some use of online tests for selection purposes.  The CIPD website have produced a factsheet on tests and testing, with links to relevant BPS/PTC documents and International Test Commission guidelines.

The factsheet defines psychological tests and sets out the key factors to consider in using tests.

CIPD FACTSHEET