Personality tests assess behavior and are used for various purposes, including recruitment and therapy evaluation. They come in different forms, such as self-report inventories and projective tests, each with advantages and challenges regarding reliability and validity. Although these tests can provide insights into personality, they are not definitive scientific measures.

1. Issues with personality tests
What is personality?
Personality refers to the person’s behavior by the way of acting,
thinking, feeling and that makes the person unique in his behavior.it
generally refers to persons internal factors.
What is personality test?
Personality test is something that you access your behavior. It can be of
formal and informal. But most of the cases we do informally. Everybody
have their unique personality. It differs from individual in accessing
personality
How personality test is useful?
A personality test is useful to categorize different kinds of people
reacting to different environment. Additionally, this test is useful for
recruiting the job candidates in terms of following factors,
 To assess the persons knowledge
 Capable of Problem solving skills.
 Changing personality.
 To evaluate the effectiveness of therapy.

2. How to Measure personality?
The personality can be measured in the following ways.
 PBT: Paper Based Test is the method of answering questions in
paper with Questions provided in it. It mostly checks the person’s
analytical skills.
 Situational exercise. : Situational exercise is the method of
assessing the person’s behavior with respond to some situation. It
dealt with the person individual in solving the problem given in a
situation.
 Self-report inventories: Self report inventories are the kind of the
test where the test- takers read the question based on the
understanding of the question they rate it. The most common way
of self-report inventory test is Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory or MMPI.
 Projective test: Projective test is the object or the scenario based
test. The test-taker will be given a scenario and ask to interpret the
situation. The most common way of projective test is Rorschach
Inkblot Test.

3. Potential problem with personality testing:
The above methods of assessing the personality have their own strength
and weakness.
 Self-report personality test is usually conducted for a longtime.
This can make the test-taker get bored and choose the answer in a
random manner without reading the question.
 Projective personality test is used with a psychotherapy setting.
Here the therapist will quickly collect the information by observing
the client. For example, If a candidate is being assessed he will
check the person’s tone, body language and the quality of
information.
In this, the problem lies with the interpretation of their responses.
Different therapist will interpret with different analogy of
analyzing the client response.
Apart from other two problems, the person is not always good at
estimating their behavior. They tend to overestimate the factors which as
some importance in it.
Therefore the Two problems in personality testing
 Reliability
 Accuracy (validity)

4. What is Reliability?
Reliability gives the consistency of same score on repeated measurement
of personality. The test is reliable only if it as a same score on repeated
measurement. Unfortunately, it is not possible to have same score all the
time.
Types of Reliability:
 Inter-rater reliability: Inter-rater reliability is the person is being
assessed with two judges on his test report. Based on the score of
the individual judges and the consistency measurement of score the
raters will determine which category the individual fall into it.
 Test-retest reliability: Test-retest reliability is the person being
assessed with same test at different times. This type of reliability
assumes that there is no change in quality of answer even at
different times
 Parallel-forms reliability: Parallel-forms reliability evaluates
different questions and question sets that seek to assess the same
construct in a parallel manner.
 Inter-consistency reliability: Inter-consistency reliability
evaluates by asking different questions that test the same construct
should give consistent results For example, in project viva the
question is asked in a different manner to get the same answer
consistently.

5. Factors that influence reliability:
There are number of different factors that can have an influence on the
reliability of a measure. If the measuring variable changes regularly then
the result will not be consistent. For example, if a test is conducted in a
room that is extremely hot, the person will get distracted easily. This is
may also have an impact on reliability measure.
Reliability Vs Validity:
Reliability is different from validity. Validity refers to whether or not a
test really measures what it claims to measure. Reliability is the measure
of precision whereas validity is the measure of accuracy.
Conclusion: Scientific Vs Entertaining
There are different personality assessments test conducted, but
personality scores and personal skills are two different things. The test
can be entertaining and they might even give you a little insight into
your personality, but they are in no way formal, scientific assessments of
personality.