Every job I've applied for -- yes, even "dog-catcher" -- has required a test. So did college: both undergrad admissions, and seminary. Teaching, ministry, civil service -- all asked for paper and pencil tests plus interviews. For the dog catcher job I was interviewed by a panel of six people. One was a young black man who fell in love with my tales of rez life -- I'm pretty sure he's who got me the job. He was willing to risk the first female, even if I were white.
If I applied to be a legislator, let alone the President of the United States, I wouldn't have to take a test. Even if I did, the pressure and sudden challenges of the office itself might change me. I read an essay once analyzing how Supreme Court Justices become more resourceful and humane after a few years of experience with difficult realities. In the case of Trump, being in office for only a short time has been pouring accelerant on a house fire. Some experts say by Christmas only a shell will be left.
At some point I took an MMPI, the Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory. There are new versions now. I remember being interested but unmoved while others were quite angry, so it was probably when declaring interest in the UU ministry, which can attract some doozies. Like Jim Jones, for instance. The trouble with this sort of test is that it is framed up from inside the culture, so it reflects one point of view about what is extreme or normal.
Bill Haw, the high school counselor, once had a test he used on teachers, which showed whether your culture were rattlesnake or cobra. Covertly, it indicated whether your attitude to life was more as a Black or a White. It was a good instrument for jogging the smug.
Once I had a conversation with David Pohl, who was the head of UUA ministerial placement at the time. He said that both the congregations and the candidates were so various that it was hard to get a good match. The colorful ones might get stuck in a safe gray church with painful results, or the other way around.
The most useless element for me was the psychological interview. She gave me a Rorschach inkblot test that just looked blotto to me, and said she was Jewish and really had no idea what constituted a Xian minister. She could not grasp the idea of a non-creedal mainstream denomination that included atheists. So she asked me to describe myself, and I did, which was a mistake because I tend to be hard on myself and later people took the results seriously.
David Pohl said the single best indicator the UUA had for ministers was the first year of Clinical Pastoral Education which consisted of ten weeks in a hospital, prison, or high pressure industry. The idea was to confront extreme emotion in high risk settings and then spend a few daily hours processing one's reactions and strategies. My little group did well, but our supervisor flunked. He was a UU minister.
For a while Myers-Briggs was a big fav, but now it's sort of degenerated into a bar pickup line on singles night. The roots in Jungian theory are a bit neglected.
A newer test is the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R), a personality inventory that examines a person's Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). NEO-PI stands for Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness. All the tests tend to concentrate on defects rather than virtues.
The Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) measures two pervasive, independent dimensions of personality, Extraversion-Introversion and Neuroticism-Stability, which account for most of the variance in the personality domain.
It's easy to imagine a person who is entirely charming and easily passes such tests, but also lies, steals, and rapes. In fact, much literature comes from this possibility. It is the source of much trouble. We all thought Trump had lots of money and that his little jokes about women weren't serious.
In fact, we tend to react to political elections as though we were evaluating the character in murder mysteries. The good-looking and familiar attract us. Part of the trouble for people with color is that villains have been cast so much as dark people that the conceit has crept into our subconsciousnesses. But old Nazi movies have backfired -- somehow they signal power and mix it with cruelty. Less educated people tend to still use the moral principle of sentimentality that was strong in the 19th century. One of the good things about Downton Abbey was that the Earl of Grantham, who held to those patriarchal principles, was constantly challenged without being hated or punished.
This general statement about psych testing is from: https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-psychological-assessment/
"Psychological assessment is a process of testing that uses a combination of techniques to help arrive at some hypotheses about a person and their behavior, personality and capabilities. Psychological assessment is also referred to as psychological testing, or performing a psychological battery on a person. Psychological testing is nearly always performed by a licensed psychologist, or a psychology trainee (such as an intern). Psychologists are the only profession that is expertly trained to perform and interpret psychological tests.
"Psychological assessment should never be performed in a vacuum. A part of a thorough assessment of an individual is that they also undergo a full medical examination, to rule out the possibilities of a medical, disease or organic cause for the individual’s symptoms. It’s often helpful to have this done first, before psychological testing (as it may make psychological testing moot)."
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