Practitioner Guidelines for Psychometric Testing

Predicted Profiling

In all situations where personality profiling is being used it is considered ‘best practice’ to offer the test taker a debriefing to determine the extent to which they believe the profile obtained is a fair and accurate representation of them. The following methodology is written with SHL’s Occupational Personality Questionnaire in mind, but it can be adapted to suit any equivalent measure.

This exercise is completed before debriefing and the respondent will also need to be provided with a blank copy of the profile chart especially for this purpose.

Instructions for respondents:

Purpose of this Exercise

The purpose of this exercise is to:

• check the accuracy of the results obtained from the personality questionnaire you recently completed;
  
• offer you some familiarity with the measure and what it measures;
  
• provide an indicator as to how well you ‘know yourself.’

Where significant discrepancies exist between your ratings on this predicted profile and you actual scores we can then, with your agreement, incorporate that into the final picture obtained.

Instructions

Please study the blank profile chart that accompanies this document. The personality characteristics it measures are described down the side of the page. Look at them now.

Let us suppose, for example, you obtained a score of 6 on the first factor, Persuasive. To understand the meaning of a score of 6 track down to the bottom of the chart where you will see some percentiles. You will find that a score of 6 lies at the 60th percentile. This would mean that you had rated the items about Persuasiveness more strongly than 60% of other people in the reference group describe themselves.

The people you are being compared against are a large group of professional and managerial workers outside Ciba. Therefore, the profile chart will offer you a comparison, on all of those 32 factors, against other professional people.

If you study the percentile scores at the bottom, you will find that most people score towards the middle, between 4 and 7. Fewer people score at the extremes. For example, if you were to score 10 on any factor you would be scoring higher than 99% of others, in the top 1%. If, however, you were to score a 1, 99% of other people would be scoring higher than you. Obviously, the more you score towards the right, the more you are like descriptions on the right; the more you score towards the left, the more you are like the descriptions found there.

Please now predict your scores. All you have to do is place a clear mark on the chart in the place where you think your score will be.

If any predicted score is three points or more away from your actual score it will be an important point of discussion in your forthcoming debriefing.