Testing Testing

I assumed that after 17 years in full time education I'd had my fair share of tests, exams and assessments. It all began back in Year 2 with SATs - I can't remember them in the slightest but I'm going to assume I passed. Fast forward a decade and there were GCSEs and A-Levels, which at the time felt like they were the be all and end all. They were not; as with many things in life, it soon became apparent that they were merely stepping stones towards a far more diffuse aim, that of beginning that elusive thing known as 'a career'. After a further four years at university and the accordant exams, essays and dissertations, I was thoroughly tested out; but at least I had numerous certificates to prove my academic credentials and (I hoped) my intelligence.

Needless to say, when it comes to applying for graduate jobs this is not enough. During applications I have been subjected to a variety of tests and assessments, all of which are designed as a convenient method of unearthing the perfect candidate. Putting the practicalities of filtering through hundreds of applicants aside, it is more than a little frustrating to have my 17 years of education dismissed on the basis of a 15 minute online test. In my opinion, there are many different forms of intelligence, not all of which are tailored to answering logic puzzles or verbal reasoning questions. It is a means of selection that ensures successful candidates come from a very particular mould with a very generic skill set. This may be what businesses and other recruiters want, but I know they are dismissing very talented people on what appears to be an arbitrary basis; there is no room to prove creativity or demonstrate any strength of character. It seems like a lazy method of recruitment.

These tests take a variety of forms, some of which have come as a shock after four years studying humanities. Firstly, the verbal reasoning test: these questions comprise a short paragraph followed by a series of statements which the candidate must state as 'true', 'false' or 'cannot tell' based on the information given. Its not that these tests are phenomenally difficult (they perhaps suit my skills as a historian), but the time limits are tight - you must work quickly if you are to assess the text and answer 40 statements in 15 minutes. Secondly, there is the numeracy test which, having given up Maths after GCSE, certainly has proved challenging. In some spectacularly poor time management, on my first attempt at this type of assessment, I managed to answer 10 out of 20 questions in the allocated time - of the questions answered I managed to get 9 correct but this was largely irrelevant considering how long it was taking me to work through each conundrum. It seems I need to brush up on my skills.

Finally, we come to my most detested of all the tests used by employers, psychometric analysis. Tests where there is no right or wrong answer, merely scenarios designed to find out what kind of person you are - whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, to discover your work ethic, your attitudes and your weaknesses. I can only presume that recruiters associate particular traits with particular roles - again this seems arbitrary and unfair. Give me an interview and you would discover what type of person I am within five minutes.

I may be able to give you a detailed analysis of Rousseau's 'Social Contract' or Montesquieu's 'Spirit of the Laws'; ask me about the popular reaction to the French Revolution in Britain and I will talk to you for an hour - but none of this matters in the real world. Because I am not an extrovert and because I prefer to work independently, this is translated by some to mean 'boring' and not a 'team player'. I am no expert on psychology but I fear the likes of Jung and Freud would be turning in their graves if they saw the way their theories were manipulated and erroneously applied by some employers...