Assessment Tests - article by Whimsical Wire Articles

On one level, I have no problem with assessment tests. After all, they are useful in a wide variety of ways. An aptitude test can help you discover if you are fit for a certain class or if you need to start at a lower level, a psychological assessment test can be used in high stress jobs to to predict burnout, and so on. However, I think it has gone a little bit too far. Nowadays, we see assessment testing in almost every area. There are even kindergarten assessment tests, meant to hold young students to certain standards of education when they have only just begun to develop. At that young an age, people grow at different speeds, so too much testing pressure can be detrimental. We try too hard to put everyone in boxes, and I think that society pays a heavy price.

One of my biggest problems with assessment tests is that, increasingly, they don't give people the opportunity to prove themselves in the workplace. One time I actually lost a job based on a psychological assessment! They told me that I had done very well on the aptitude test, and that I was almost guaranteed to get the job. Unfortunately, they also gave me a personality test. They must have decided that I was not much of a team player, because they never called me back. I knew other people who were hired for the same position, and none of them were nearly as skilled as I was. If they had let me prove myself at the workplace, they would have found out that, team player or not, I am an excellent worker.

Fortunately, most jobs do not employ these assessment tests yet. As a matter of fact, you only usually find them at the very big corporations, the ones that hire hundreds of people at a time and need efficient ways to root through candidates. In my opinion, this is why big business is so inefficient. Although the large companies have more resources, more funding, and more connections, they also have backwards hiring practices. Rather than looking at every potential applicant as a person, they try to see them as a list of scores. It is no wonder that they often do not hire the right people for the job. How could they, when so many candidates are weeded out based on an arbitrary test assessment?

Most Recent Articles