Section 1: Characteristics of Psychological Tests
Psychological Tests
 Try to find out a great deal about a person in a short
amount of time
 Predicting success in a career
 Finding out interests
 Revealing psychological problems
 Compare individuals to others
 DANGER!!!!!
 Merely tools to measure or predict behavior
 Fairness and usefulness of a test depends on 3 things
 Reliability, Validity, and Standardization
Test Reliability
 Reliability- refers to a test’s consistency
 Will it yield the same results under a variety of
circumstances
 Test-retest reliability- if person retakes the test or a
similar test do they get approximately the same score

Ex. ACT
 Interscorer reliability- will a test yield the same results
when scored at different times by different people

Ex. Writing OGT
 Split-half reliability- randomly divide test in half, are the
two scores the same
Ex. My tests
Test Validity
 Validity- the ability of a test to measure what it is
intended to measure
 Ex. Spanish test will not measure engineering ability
 Main method for measuring validity is to find out how
well it predicts performance- predictive validity

Ex. Do student who do well on the ACT do well in college?
Standardization
 Standardization refers to 2 things
 1. Tests must be administered and scored the same way
every time
 2. must establish the norm, or average score, made by a
large group of people
 Establishing norms
 Raw score can be decieving

Ex. Is a 60% good on a test
 Percentile system- ranking of test scores that indicates
the ratio of scores lower and higher than a given score
 In order to make comparisons, the test is first given to a
large representative sample of the group to be measured

Ex. Juniors for the ACT
 Norms- standard of comparison for test results
developed by giving the test to large, well-defined
groups of people

Norms refer only to what has been found to be average for a
particular group