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Ethical Standards in Testing

 Maintaining ethical standards in testing is one of the SOURCES OF INFORMATION ABOUT TESTING
more important ethical issues confronting the entire
 The most important source of information about testing
profession of psychology (APA, 2002).
is the series of Mental Measurements Yearbooks
 The APA has also issued guidelines and user
(MMY).
qualifications to ensure that tests are administered and
 The MMY was first published in 1938 and is now
interpreted correctly (Turner et al., 2001).
revised every two years.
According to APA some of the rights of the test takers are:  Some psychological journals review specific tests, and
various professional test developers publish test
 Be treated with courtesy, respect, regardless of age,
manuals.
disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion,
sexual orientation or other personal characteristics. Some sources of information about testing

 Receive a brief explanation prior to testing about the  Electronic Listings

purposes for testing, the kinds of test to be used.  Special-purpose collections
 Books about single test
 Individuals freedom to decline and freedom to withdraw
is respected. TEST CONTENT

 Have test administered and your test results INTELLIGENCE TESTS/ COGNITIVE ABILITY TESTS
interpreted by trained individuals who follow
 Tests designed to measure the level of intelligence or
professional codes of ethics
the amount of knowledge possessed by an applicant
Other Ethical Issues  Includes such dimensions as oral and written
comprehension, oral and written expression, numerical
 Invasion of Privacy
facility, originality, memorization, reasoning
 Confidentiality (mathematical, deductive, inductive), and general
learning.
Invasion of Privacy
 Cognitive ability is thought to predict work performance
 A condition associated with testing pertaining to the in two ways: by allowing employees to quickly learn
asking of questions on a test that are unrelated to the job-related knowledge and by processing information
test’s intent or are inherently intrusive to the test taker. resulting in better decision-making.
 It is important for professional, clerical, and supervisory
Confidentiality jobs, including such occupations as supervisor,
 A condition associated with testing pertaining to which accountant, and secretary.
parties have access to test results. STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
Some major ethical standards  Highest validity of  Low face validity
all selection  Difficult to set a
 Competence of Psychologists measures (ρ =.51) passing score
 Informed Consent  Easy to administer  Likely to cause
 Relatively adverse impact
 Knowledge of Result inexpensive
 Most are not time-
 Test Security
consuming
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Wonderlic Personnel Test  The test is a series of pictures that illustrate various
mechanical facts and principles.
 designed to measure your cognitive ability by
assessing your verbal reasoning, math and logic skills.  The Bennett test (aka Bennett aptitude test) developed
by Pearson can help candidates showcase their spatial
 The short amount of time (12 minutes) necessary to
perception skills and mechanical reasoning abilities,
take the test, as well as the fact that it can be
and it is used to identify the best candidates for
administered in a group setting, makes it popular.
mechanical, repair, and industrial occupations.
Other popular cognitive tests are:
SENSORY/ MOTOR ABILITY TESTS
 Miller Analogies Test
 Assess visual acuity, color vision and hearing
 Quick Test
sensitivity.
 Raven Progressive Matrices.
 These abilities are related to success in certain types
SIENA REASONING TEST (SRT)
of jobs.
 The Siena Reasoning Test or SRT is a logical aptitude SNELLEN EYE CHART
test to help evaluate the cognitive abilities of job
applicants.  A display with rows of letters that get increasingly
smaller.
 This test is broken into verbal and non-verbal sections:
 The test-taker stands 20 feet away from the chart and
 Verbal Section
reads each row until the letters are indistinguishable. A
 Non-verbal Section
ratio is then computed to express acuity.
SITUATIONAL JUDGEMENT TEST

 A type of test that describes a problem situation to the

test taker and requires the test taker to rate various
possible solutions in terms of their feasibility or
applicability.
AUDIOMETER
 Applicants are given a series of situations and asked
how they would handle each one. These situations  Most common way to measure hearing sensitivity.
cover such topics (constructs) as leadership skills,  An audiometer produces tones of different frequencies
interpersonal skills, personality tendencies, teamwork, and loudness. The tone is gradually raised in intensity.
and job knowledge.
Test of motor ability assess fine or gross motor
MECHANICAL APTITUDE TESTS coordination. Two frequently used motor ability test are:
 Require a person to recognize which mechanical  Purdue Pegboard
principle is suggested by a test item.  Crawford Small Parts Dexterity Test
 The underlying concepts measured by these include Sensory/motor ability tests manifest a typical validity
sound and heat conductance, velocity, gravity, and coefficient of .20 - .25. They are most predictive of job success
force. in clerical occupations.
 Muchinsky (2004) reported that tests of mechanical
ability are highly predictive of performance in
manufacturing/production jobs.

BENNETT TEST OF MECHANICAL COMPREHENSION

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Purdue Pegboard Extraversion – the tendency to be sociable, assertive, active,
talkative, energetic, and outgoing.

Openness to experience – the disposition to be curious,

imaginative, and unconventional.

Agreeableness – the disposition to be cooperative, helpful, and

easy to get along with.

Conscientiousness – the disposition to be purposeful,

determined, organized, and controlled.
Crawford Small Parts Dexterity Test
 Conscientiousness is the best predictor in most
occupations and for most criteria; and

 The validity of the other four personality dimensions is

dependent on the type of job and criterion for which the
test is being validated.

PERSONALITY INVENTORIES

 Becoming increasingly popular as an employee

selection method, in part because they predict Examples of common measures personality used in
performance better than was once thought, and in part employment selection
because they result in less adverse impact than do
 Hogan Personality Inventory
ability tests.
 California Psychological Inventory
 No ‘right or wrong’ answers.  NEO-PI (Neuroticism Extraversion, Openness
Personality Inventory)
 In personality inventories similarly types of questions
 16 PF
normally make up a scale, which reflects a person’s
introversion, dominance, confidence, and so on. INTEGRITY TESTS

 These scale scores are then used to predict job  “HONESTY TESTS”
success.  A type of paper-and-pencil test that purports to assess
a test taker’s honesty, character, or integrity.
MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INVENTOR (MBTI)
 It is designed to identify job applicants who will not
 Is predicated upon 16 personality types. steal from their employer or otherwise engage in
counterproductive behavior on the job.
 Each type is created by a person’s status on four
dichotomies: Extraversion – Introversion, Sensing – 2 TYPES
Intuition, Thinking – Feeling, and Judgment –
Overt integrity test
Perception.
 based on the premise that a person’s attitudes about
 MBTI is widely used to make personnel selection
theft as well as his previous theft behavior will
decisions and to help people understand their own
accurately predict his future honesty.
personalities.
Personality-based integrity test
“BIG 5” THEORY OF PERSONALITY
 more general in that they tap a variety of personality
Neuroticism – the person’s characteristic level of stability
traits thought to be related to a wide range of
versus instability
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counterproductive behavior such as theft,
absenteeism, and violence.
PHYSICAL ABILITIES TESTING
 Often used for jobs that require physical strength and
stamina, such as police officers, firefighters, factory
workers, and lifeguards.
 Fleishman and Quaintance (pp.463 – 464) presented
the set of abilities relevant to work performance. These
are some critical physical abilities.
1. Static strength – “the ability to use muscle force to lift,
push, pull, or carry objects”
2. Explosive strength – “the ability to use bursts of
muscle force to propel oneself or an object”
3. Gross body coordination – “the ability to coordinate
the movement of the arms, legs, and torso in activities
where the whole body is in motion”
4. Stamina – “the ability of the lungs and circulatory
(blood) systems of the body to perform efficiently over
time”
 Physical abilities reveals they are related to successful
job performance in physically demanding jobs.
 Indeed, Hoffman (1999) successfully validated of a
series physical ability tests for selecting employees for
construction and mechanical jobs.
MECHANICAL APTITUDE TESTS BATTERIES
 Test “batteries” consists many of the types of tests:
intelligence, mechanical aptitude, personality, and so
on.
 These tests are often long, often taking several hours
to complete.
 Each part of the test measures such factors as
intellectual ability and mechanical reasoning.
 They yield a great deal of information that can be used
later for hiring, placement, training, and so forth.
 The major disadvantages of the test are the cost and
time involved.
 The two most widely known multiple-aptitude batteries
are:
o Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
(ASVAB)
o Differential Aptitude Test (DAT)
ARMED SERVICES VOCATIONAL APTITUDE BATTERY
(ASVAB)
 a heavily researched and well-respected aptitude test
developed by the Department of Defense. It measures
a young adult's strengths and potential for success in
military training.
DIFFERENTIAL APTITUDE TEST (DAT)
 a tool that measures your abilities and skills, such as
verbal, numerical ability, abstract reasoning,
mechanical reasoning and space relations. The DAT is
used with adults looking at a wide range of career and
planning options, including some industrial firms.
COMPUTERIZED ADAPTIVE TESTING
 “TAILORED TESTING”
 A form of assessment using a computer in which the
questions have been precalibrated in terms of difficulty,
and the examinee’s response (i.e., right or wrong) to
one question determines the selection of the next
question.
 CAT is an automated test administration system that
uses a computer.
 The purpose of CAT is to get as close a match as
possible between the question-difficulty level and the
examinee’s demonstrated ability level.
 CAT systems are based on complex mathematical
models.
 The military is the largest user of CAT systems, testing
thousands of examinees monthly.
Current Issues in Testing and The Value of Testing
Current Issues in Testing
 Advances are being made in the format of test
questions. Traditional multiple-choice test questions
have one correct answer.
 Given this characteristic, test questions have to be
written such that there is indeed a correct answer to the
question, and only one correct answer (Haladyna,
1999).
 In real life, however, many problems and questions
don’t have a single correct answer. Rather, an array of
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answers is possible, some more plausible or  Testing has its place in our repertoire of diagnostic
appropriate than others. instruments; tests should help us meet our needs and
not be the master of our decisions.
Situational judgment test
In some cases that many people don ’t like to be tested, find
 A type of test that describes a problem situation to the
the process intimidating or anxiety-producing, and are
test taker and requires the test taker to rate various
highly concerned about what use will be made of their test
possible solutions in terms of their feasibility or
results
applicability.
 In recent years the biggest change in psychological  Tenopyr (1998) described organized efforts by some
testing is in the way tests are administered and scored. groups of people opposed to testing to get laws passed
 As Thompson et al. (2003) described, the movement pertaining to the legal rights of test takers, bearing such
“from paper to pixels ” is affecting all phases of titles as “The Test Takers ’ Bill of Rights.” here is the
assessment. link to APA The Rights of Test Takers: Guidelines for
Testing Professionals
Potential Advantage of Internet Based Testing
https://www.apa.org/science/programs/testi ng/rights
 Naglieri et al. (2004) described how the Internet offers  We cannot seriously hope to abolish testing in society
a faster and cheaper means of testing. because the alternative to testing is not testing at all.
 Test publishers can download new tests to secure What we can strive to accomplish is to make testing
testing sites in a matter of moments. highly accurate and fair to all parties concerned
 Updating a test is also much easier because there is (Muchinsky,2006).
no need to print new tests, answer keys, or manuals.  Meyer et al. (2001) concluded that psychological test
validity is compelling and comparable to medical test
Potential Issues of Internet Based Testing validity.
 One is test security and whether test content can be
compromised. 1. From an i /o perspective is that some tests are useful
in forecasting job success and others are not.
 Second issue pertains to proctoring.
2. As an entire class of predictors, psychological tests
o With unproctored web-based testing, the
have been moderately predictive of job performance.
applicant completes the test from any location
3. Psychological tests have outperformed all other types
with Internet access and without direct
of predictors across the full spectrum of jobs.
supervision of a test administrator.
4. Although test validity coefficients are not as high as we
o With proctored web-based testing, the
would like, it is unfair to condemn tests as useless.
applicant must complete the test in the
presence of a test administrator, usually at a
company sponsored location.

The Value of Testing

 There is nothing mysterious about psychological tests;

they are merely tools to help us make better decisions
than we could make without them.
 Many people have decried the “tyranny of testing”—
the fact that critical decisions (say, entrance into a
college or professional school) that affect an entire
lifetime are based on a single test.
 The criticism relates more to the inappropriate use of
good tests than to poor quality.