Students who use online personality tests to gauge character traits find inaccurate results, experts say assessments should be used solely for entertainment

By John Du

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Sophomore Erika Stith, like many other students, checks her Facebook account often. Although she uses the social networking website Facebook to chat with friends and to keep in touch with her more distant friends, Stith also takes a good number of the quizzes available on the site for fun. However, she said she finds some of the personality quizzes that she has taken are wrong about her.

Stith is not the only one having issues with Facebook quizzes. Because it is so easy to create a quiz on Facebook, there are many personality quizzes and tests that may not be as accurate as they could be. Still, that does not prevent people from taking the quizzes. For example, one quiz named “What Color Is Your Soul?” gained over 500,000 active monthly users over the course of ten days, according to Facebook.

Psychology teacher Robin Pletcher gives the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a personality quiz, to her students after going over different aspects of personality and assessment during class. That test, as opposed to many of the quizzes found on Facebook, is actually based on the theories of psychologist David Keirsey. Pletcher said part of the reason Facebook quizzes do not assess personality well is that Facebook quizzes would not be able to judge something like personality mostly because of the incredibly short length they tend to have.

“I would think that it would be hard to determine somebody’s personality on just ten questions,” Pletcher said. “I would think that there are so many different aspects to a person that ten questions would seem like it’s pretty limited. Some of these personality tests are around 500 questions. That’s really getting into the person’s real personality. Increasing the number of questions would increase the reliability of the test or the scientific basis of the test. A lot of times they will reword questions later in the test in order to make sure that the person is answering them truthfully, and that’s hard to do with a quiz with ten questions.”

Sophomore Olivia Ross has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is a personality test that is both longer and more in-depth than the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. She said the Facebook quizzes were not only inaccurate but also not as helpful as the other, more professional personality tests.

“Since I had an extroverted personality, it said I would work well by working with people, so that’s something I’m considering. The Myers-Briggs personality test has kind of given me a better understanding of how I learn and what environments I work well in,” Ross said. “I don’t think Facebook things are accurate because they don’t give enough options. The range of questions isn’t large enough, and the questions aren’t specific enough either. It’s suited for maybe four basic types, whereas a test like the Myers-Briggs has 16 personality codes.”

Even though Ross took the Myers-Briggs, she acknowledged some error in the results. Pletcher said tests may end with inaccurate results not only because of a generally bad test, like those on Facebook, but also because of something the test taker did.

“Well, on some of those questions where you weren’t necessarily so sure how to answer it so you kind of went back and forth,” Pletcher said. “So if there were like five or six questions that you were unsure of, then it would have changed the results.”

Both Stith and Ross said they usually take the quizzes on Facebook for fun anyway.

Stith said, “There are a few good things about having short quizzes. You can do the Facebook quizzes really quickly, and sometimes they’re funny. I think that they’re just generally fun to take.”