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I underwent a personality test today as part of a job interview. The questions looked about like this:

M   L
_   _    Reliable, Dependable
_   _    Easy-Going, Good-Natured
_   _    Driven, Motivated
_   _    Persuasive, Convincing

40 or so of these questions existed, and in each case you have to mark two Xs - one in the "M" column for "most like me" and one in the "L" column for "least like me."

The problem I have with questions like this is one of context: I'm all of those things, depending on the context. I act differently when I'm buying a car than I do when I'm hanging out at a baseball game with friends. Or working with a team versus working for myself. I did choose "Easily Adapts" as an "M" in one of the series of choices, but… for the most part, I spent the time scratching my head. I could take the same test tomorrow and answer completely differently depending on how I interpreted the questions and to what situation I applied them in my mind.

Another series of questions in a different test asked things like this: "Which of these words is not like the others: frog, fox, bear, fish, flock?" I chose "flock" in such instances, because the word describes a group instead of a single entity. But I spent a lot of time really trying to determine whether I chose correctly, because "bear" is the only word that starts with something other than "f," for example. "Bear" is also the only word with two vowels. You could probably list twenty such differences, and with only the minimal directions provided, who knows what the right answer is. That being said, I'm fairly confident I chose the "correct" answer.

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