A personal experience with some psychological tests
In my second year as a psychology student at McGill, I was lucky enough to be able to experience some of the intelligence tests that are discussed in our class. The opportunity was advertised at the beginning of one of my Introduction to Personality lectures as a means for McGill’s graduate students in clinical psychology to administer tests to a non-clinical sample, and for undergraduates to get to participate in the test-taking experience and hopefully learn something about themselves. The thought crossed my mind that it might be interesting, but what made me decide to actually take the initiative to participate were the words of a stranger sitting to my left, another psychology student. “I did this last year,” she whispered to me, as the advertisement concluded and the class applauded. “You should try it, it’s really cool.”
She wasn’t wrong. After signing and handing in the required forms, I was contacted by a grad student named Julien. We arranged a schedule for to meet 3 times in the Education Building across the next few weeks. My testing took place in a bright, windowless room, furnished with two chairs and a table. Julien brought stacks of folders, books and binders, making up the materials of the tests he would be administering. Although I’m sure he described them all in detail, my memory fails me when I try to remember each of the tests I took: certainly, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, but also some tests clearly meant for young children. Julien would apologetically explain this to me before asking questions like “What’s 2 + 9?”
The clearest impression I have of these sessions was how professional the administration was. Many of the instructions seemed quite obvious or redundant, but Julien would patiently read through them all and ascertain that I understood. It was interesting to observe the two jobs he had to perform: making sure the tests were being administered exactly as the manual dictated, but also putting me at ease and emphasizing that this was not a high pressure situation (after all, this was strictly voluntary — I wasn’t being compensated for my time or receiving class credit). The tests were enjoyable, some more than others. I breezed through the vocabulary, took a bit more time with the block design test, and performed pretty miserably on the picture completion. After giving me feedback about my results, Julien thanked me for putting in effort in each of the tasks, but that hadn’t been a problem. I’m sure it’s not the case for everyone, but I found the tests very intrinsically motivating in themselves. It was quite easy to forget these tests were meant to be measuring my levels of intelligence because most of them were genuinely absorbing and fun to try, and there was enough variation from task to task that I never became too bored. All in all, I was glad that I’d participated. It remains to be seen whether or not I’ll end up as a graduate student, administering the WAIS-IV to undergraduates and clients myself, but I think it was a valuable experience no matter what. In any case, it gave me an excuse not to be studying in McLennan Library for a couple of hours.
