Personality Tests

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.

What Kind of Elitist Are You?
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Some are these personality tests are surprisingly perceptive. I took a class on Career Management in my MBA program. While aspects of the course dealt with salary negotiation, management, reviews and the like, much of the course consisted of taking over a hundred different personality tests on a wide variety of areas. I probably learned more about myself in those three months than at any other time since childhood.

While there are flaws in asking qualitative questions and assigning numeric values to responses because of weighting issues as well as larger issues of appropriateness, these tests do have a certain validity to them. They cluster a population into several segments based on a few set of attributes, which can be compared and contrasted with each other. This is what marketing people supposedly do, by the way. Members of each cluster are interviewed to expose more similarities within clusters and differences between clusters. This allows tests to be predictive and explanatory based on empirical and historical data--similar to collaborative filtering techniques one finds at Amazon, which refers customers to books purchased by other like-minded buyers

For example, some tests, like the Myers Brigg test (which declared me to be a borderline INTJ/INTP) can conclude what one's ideal job should be. (I must say that a personality test that I was forced to take in high school predicted that I would drop out of college, and stated that my ideal job would be a bus driver. It looks like a missed my true calling.)