Psychometric Test Case Study

Psychometric tests have been an unfair way in assessing candidates as it has not only been biased to the interviewee but also to the interviewer too. First of all, psychometric test may be tricky as in one might perform really well on a psychometric test and mess up the whole job he’s responsible and vice versa. Last year Paul Flowers, a bank chief, was hired mainly based on his test results. Despite having no relevant previous experience in finance jobs, he was hired as chairman of the Co-op Bank for a well-paid three-figure salary after performing exceptionally well on his psychometric test. Flowers was later forced to quit in disgrace because of a £1.5billion black hole in his balance sheet. On the other hand, a friend of mine was applying

people often lie on these tests as psychometric tests can be easily manipulated. They may not be done by one’s self only but by the help of friends, colleagues, family members or even paid test specialists. You’d say that such cases are rare, but I’ve encountered one myself when I was once doing a psychometric test in a room full of 9 postgraduates. when complaining about how hard the assessment was a conversation started in the room about psychometric tests. One of them said to me: “do you really solve psychometric tests alone? No one does that. you need the help of a group of people in order to pass such a test.” I thought he was the only one who does that, to discover that the whole room agreed with him. I returned home googling psychometric tests and cheating to find an article that discusses how the extent of cheating on such tests is on the rise; stories have made the headlines in The New York Times documenting cheating on tests that asses a wide range of vocations, knowledge, and skills (Cizek, 2001).
One of the reasons of the popular usage of Psychometric tests is the relative ease in which it is possible to collect large amounts of data at one sitting from large number of respondents (Hammond, 2000).However, how relevant is the information we are getting ?(ADD SOMETHING)and Howe (1997) aids my claim by arguing that test scores assess many unknown processes and instead of measuring intelligence or establishing why

why should the test be the main factor of accepting or declining a candidate? Why not put it in one’s file for future reference, company studies, or employee developmental and training plans. Critics do not dispute the stability of test scores, nor the fact that they predict certain forms of achievement as school achievement. However, they do argue that it is invalid to base a concept of intelligence on test scores alone as you’d be ignoring many important aspects of mental ability (Neisser et al., 1996). It’s like going to a supermarket and asking for a specific aptitude test in ‘clerical administration’ and being given the ‘one size fits all’ supervisors test. You’ll get some sort of test result, but it won’t measure what you