Types of Test

Personality Test

A personality test is a tool used to assess human personality. Personality testing and assessment
refer to techniques designed to measure the characteristic patterns of traits that people exhibit across
various situations. Personality tests can be used to help clarify a clinical diagnosis, guide therapeutic
interventions, and help predict how people may respond in different situations.

Personality tests are administered for a number of different purposes, including:

 Assessing theories

 Evaluating the effectiveness of therapy

 Diagnosing psychological problems

 Looking at changes in personality

 Screening job candidates

Types of Personality Tests

 Self-report inventories involve having test-takers read questions and then rate how well the
question or statement applies to them. A self-report inventory is a type of psychological
test often used in personality assessment. The greatest benefit of self-report inventories is that
they can be standardized and use established norms. Self-inventories are also relatively easy to
administer and have much higher reliability and validity
 Projective tests involve presenting the test-taker with a vague scene, object, or scenario and
then asking them to give their interpretation of the test item. A projective test is a type
of personality test in which you offer responses to ambiguous scenes, words, or images.
Projective tests are most often used in psychotherapy settings and allow therapists to quickly
gather a great deal of information about a client. The goal of such tests is to uncover the hidden
conflicts or emotions that you project onto the test with the hope that these issues can then be
addressed through psychotherapy or other appropriate treatments.

Performance Test

Performance assessment, also known as alternative or authentic assessment, is a form of testing

that requires students to perform a task rather than select an answer from a ready-made list.
Experienced raters either teachers or other trained staff judged the quality of the student's work based
on an agreed-upon set of criteria.

Diagnostic Test

Diagnosis consists of identifying the nature of an illness or other problem through the

examination of relevant symptoms. In education, a diagnostic test helps identify a student's learning
problems so teachers can provide instruction to remedy those problems.

A diagnostic assessment is a form of pre-assessment where teachers can evaluate students’ strengths,
weaknesses, knowledge and skills before their instruction. 
A diagnostic assessment refers to an assignment written at the beginning and end of a course. Post-
course assessments can be compared with pre-course assessments and can show students’ potential
improvement in certain areas. These assessments allow the instructor to adjust the curriculum to meet
the needs of current—and future—students.

Diagnostic assessment is used to determine the current level of knowledge and skill of a learner. The
learning activities of such individual would be developed and tailored along those lines. Diagnostic
assessment is best used at the initial point to get a glimpse into the learner’s stage of learning.

Achievement Test

An Achievement test is an assessment of developed knowledge or skill. The most common type of
achievement test is a standardized test, such as the SAT, required for college entry in the United States.
Achievement tests are developed to measure skills and knowledge learned in a given grade level, usually
through planned instruction, such as training or classroom instruction. Achievement tests are often
contrasted with aptitude tests.

Achievement test refer to assessments which scores are often used to determine the level of instruction
for which a student is prepared. High achievement scores generally indicate that a level of mastery of
grade-level material has been reached, and that the student is prepared for advanced instruction.
Conversely, low achievement scores can indicate the need for further remediation or repeating a course
grade level.

The achievement tests that most people are familiar with are the standard exams taken by every
student in school. Students are regularly expected to demonstrate their learning and proficiency in a
variety of subjects. In most cases, certain scores on these achievement tests are needed in order to pass
a class or continue on to the next grade level.

Achievement tests are often used in educational and training settings. In schools, for example,
achievements tests are frequently used to determine the level of education for which students might be
prepared. Students might take such a test to determine if they are ready to enter into a particular grade
level or if they are ready to pass of a particular subject or grade level and move on to the next.

Standardized Test

A standardized test is any form of test that (1) requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or
a selection of questions from common bank of questions, in the same way, and that (2) is scored in a
“standard” or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of
individual students or groups of students. While different types of tests and assessments may be
“standardized” in this way, the term is primarily associated with large-scale tests administered to
large populations of students, such as a multiple-choice test given to all the eighth-grade public-school
students in a particular state, for example.

In addition to the familiar multiple-choice format, standardized tests can include true-false questions,
short-answer questions, essay questions, or a mix of question types. While standardized tests were
traditionally presented on paper and completed using pencils, and many still are, they are increasingly
being administered on computers connected to online programs (for a related discussion,
see computer-adaptive test). While standardized tests may come in a variety of forms, multiple-choice
and true-false formats are widely used for large-scale testing situations because computers can score
them quickly, consistently, and inexpensively. In contrast, open-ended essay questions need to be
scored by humans using a common set of guidelines or rubrics to promote consistent evaluations from
essay to essay—a less efficient and more time-intensive and costly option that is also considered to be
more subjective. (Computerized systems designed to replace human scoring are currently being
developed by a variety of companies; while these systems are still in their infancy, they are nevertheless
becoming the object of growing national debate.)

A standardized test is a method of assessment built on the principle of consistency: all test takers are
required to answer the same questions and all answers are graded in the same, predetermined way.
Standardized tests are used throughout an individual’s education: to compare class progress in
elementary or high school, to apply for higher ed using the SAT or to get into grad school with the GRE.

Standardized tests refer to large scale assessments administered to substantial groups of students.

Most standardized tests consist of multiple choice and true or false questions. Standardized tests allow
educators to compare class and student progress across a wide geographical area and are often thought
to be the most fair and objective format of large-scale testing due to the consistency in questions asked
and grading style.