Hopeful college applicants aren't the only ones who should be prepared when it comes to high-stakes tests. This Globe and Mail reply to a letter-writer concerned about employment personality testing is quite interesting:
Strictly speaking, you can refuse or withdraw from testing at any time; no psychologist worth her salt can make you sit through an assessment against your will unless you're ordered to by the court. But refusing to be assessed in a job competition is declining to play the game by the employer's rules...
Instead of saying no, ask for more information....Here's a primer on questions to ask.
First, make sure that the person administering the battery of tests is a registered psychologist or counsellor....Interpreting the test results in a responsible way is also the duty of a psychologist. Psychologists can't make sweeping statements that aren't justified by the test results or they can be booted out of their professional association.
Even if this rarely happens, it's fair and prudent to ask the psychologist or the employer if you can have some general background about the testing instruments that will be used...To answer this question requires some sophistication about statistics and the role of chance and competing factors when human behaviour is measured.
If asked to recall how many statistics courses were required before they were handed a diploma, most psychologists are likely to respond with eye-rolling, grimacing, tongue protrusion and other signs of disgust.
Well, they got THAT part right. I've known too many school and clinical psychologists who hated statistics, and avoided statistics classes like the plague. They'd take the bare minimum and gripe about it the whole time. Now, I don't expect everyone to be as interested in psychometrics as I am - but still, I find troubling the anti-stats mindset that you see in abundance in psychology undergrads, and to a lesser extent in graduate students.
Not all employment testing is hogwash.
General intelligence, as measured by reputable standardized tests, was recently shown to predict job performance in a large study that analyzed much of the previous research on the topic. This study was published a few months ago by psychologists Nathan Kuncel, Sarah Hezlett and Deniz Ones, and puts to rest the notion that the standard school smarts that are linked to intelligence tests are completely different from street smarts or business smarts.
Intelligence tests are good predictors of job performance precisely because it's your level of intelligence that allows you to acquire job knowledge and skills.
Problem is, it's un-PC to say that nowadays.
Posted by kswygert at December 1, 2004 10:22 AM