Psychometric Tests

About: Psychological assessment is a series of tests for gathering information about how people think, feel, behave, and react. The findings are used to develop a report of the person’s abilities and behavior known as a psychological report, which is then used as a basis to make recommendations for the individual’s treatment. Psychological assessments and reports are used in other fields as well, like in the case of career planning for young adults or in the job application process to determine how well an applicant will fit into the open role. Based on the result of the test, an inference would be drawn about the individual’s inherent abilities and potential. Thus, an interest inventory is one tool to help one in one’s major and career exploration process by making academic and career choices, examining one’s interests, skills, personality, and values.

Objectives: A psychological test is an objective and standardized measure of an individual’s mental and/or behavioral characteristics; a systematic procedure to observe person’s behaviour or performance, describing it with the aid of a numerical scale or category system. Mostly tests are used as a way of measuring differences between people or differences in the same person over time. Psychological tests may be written, visual, or verbal evaluations administered to assess the cognitive and emotional functioning of children and adults.

Online Tests: Online psychometric tests offer a number of advantages over traditional ones. Firstly, the process of scoring of test takers’ responses can be automated. Related to this, the generation of feedback reports is instant for online measures. This dramatically decreases the time required to generate these reports, as they can, particularly in the case of personality feedback which is tedious to produce by hand. Finally, web-based psychometrics can be remotely administered to test takers. Here, we have introduced three such psychometric tests for mapping up one’s mental awareness:

• RIASEC: A colloquial name for Holland’s Occupational Themes, a model of job interests and work environments. The acronym RIASEC is derived from the six occupational themes on which it is based (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Entrepreneurial, and Conventional). The construction of this short-item inventory is to describe students’ position on John Holland’s RIASEC interest types. The instrument is meant to be used in large-scale assessment in education and on the labor market, supplementing information on school achievement and social-emotional skills as well.

• The Anxiety Rating Scale: The HAM-A was one of the first rating scales developed to measure the severity of anxiety symptoms and is still widely used today in both clinical and research settings. The scale consists of 14 items, each defined by a series of symptoms, and measures both psychic anxiety (mental agitation and psychological distress) and somatic anxiety (physical complaints related to anxiety).

• Students’ Stress Rating Scale by M.BALAMURUGAN & Dr.D.KUMARAN (SSRS):It is a seven-point scale with 35 items. In order to provide comprehensive measurement of stress experienced by students in general and higher secondary students in particular, the investigator and his supervisor had developed Students’ Stress Rating Scale (SSRS). The tool was developed through factor analysis, which consists of 35 items and were grouped under five factors namely Physiological, Emotional, Social, Examination and Behavioral Stress.

  Students at Surendranath College are hereby advised to take these tests and assess their career interest, anxiety level and level of stress. Department of Psychology is always ready to help the students in case of further guidance and assistance.