What Makes a Good Assessment?

A psychometric assessment is a standard and scientific way of assessing aspects of human behavior or performance. From an employer’s point of view an assessment has to be fair on the people applying and of course, it must actually work. This means the assessment must be reliable, valid and fair. Reliability is all about getting consistent results over time. For example, if a person takes the assessment today and then again in say six weeks’ time, they should get more or less the same results. However, being reliable is not enough because it is possible to achieve consistent results and still not be measuring anything meaningful. A test must therefore be valid; it must measure what it purports to measure. Finally an assessment must be fair insofar as it must provide equal opportunity for all. It must not discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex, race, religion, ethnicity or age.

So how do we control the quality and the effectiveness of the assessment procedures? For many informal assessment procedures such as an unstructured interview, it is very difficult to assess let alone control the quality of the process. However, psychometric assessments provide the technology for measuring the quality and effectiveness of assessment. Psychometrists (Occupational Psychologists who specialize in developing psychometric assessments) can scientifically confirm the reliability or accuracy of assessments, the validity or relevance of assessments and the fairness of the assessments to various groups of people.