How the Personality Test Works

The short version

• The statements come from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain bank of research items.
• Your answers become five scores from 0 to 100, one for each Big Five trait.
• Four of those scores become the four letters of your code, and the fifth adds -A or -T.
• All of it runs in your browser. Your answers are never sent to us.

Where do the questions come from?

Quick test: 50 statements

The quick test uses the 50-item IPIP representation of Goldberg’s (1992) markers for the Big-Five factor structure, with ten items per trait, in the order of the sample questionnaire published on the IPIP website. That item set names its five factors Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Intellect or Imagination. We call the last one Openness, and we report Emotional Stability the other way round, as Neuroticism, so both tests share the same five labels.

Full test: 116 statements

The full test uses Johnson’s (2014) IPIP-NEO-120, which measures the five traits through 30 facets of four items each. We leave out the four items of its Liberalism facet, because they ask about voting and political views. That leaves 116 items and 29 facets, and Openness is scored from its remaining 20 items. The IPIP gives no fixed order for these items, so we interleave them: one item from each facet in turn, cycling through the traits so that no trait is asked twice in a row.

Wording

Items are shown exactly as published, with “I” added in front so they read naturally. For example, “Am always prepared” becomes “I am always prepared”. A few items have a short note under them explaining a harder word. The answer choices are “Very unlike me”, “Mostly unlike me”, “In between”, “Mostly like me” and “Very like me”, scored 1 to 5, matching the IPIP five-point format.

Public domain

The IPIP website states that its items and scales are in the public domain, and that permission to use them is already granted for any purpose, commercial or not. That is why we can offer the test free and show you exactly what is in it. You can read the original item lists on the IPIP site at ipip.ori.org.

How do answers become scores?

1. Each answer gets a number from 1 (“Very unlike me”) to 5 (“Very like me”).
2. Reverse-keyed items, worded the opposite way, are flipped: the number becomes 6 minus the answer. So “very like me” on “I don’t talk a lot” counts as 1 toward Extraversion.
3. The numbers for each trait are averaged, giving a value between 1 and 5.
4. That average is moved onto a 0 to 100 scale: (average − 1) ÷ 4 × 100, rounded to a whole number.

Example: if your ten Extraversion answers average 3.8 after flipping, your score is (3.8 − 1) ÷ 4 × 100 = 70. Facet scores in the full test work the same way, using each facet’s four items. The scoring code is covered by automated tests, including checks that reversed items really are reversed.

How do scores become a type code?

Some honest notes on this mapping:

• The letters borrow a familiar format. Four-letter codes come from older ideas about personality types. On this site, each letter means exactly what the table says. Our F and T are about warmth versus frankness, and our J and P are about organization versus flexibility.
• The link to the Big Five is well documented. Research comparing a popular type questionnaire with Big Five measures found that its four dimensions line up with Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness (McCrae and Costa, 1989). The fifth trait, Neuroticism, has no place in the classic four letters, so we add it after a dash.
• The line is the middle of the scale, not the average person. Many people describe themselves as fairly warm and curious, so F and N come up more often on this test than T and S.
• Close calls are flagged. When a score is within 8 points of 50, your results say so, because that letter could easily have gone the other way. A score of exactly 50 takes the first letter in the table.

How do the trait quizzes and the introvert test work?

Each of the five Big Five trait pages has a short quiz. It uses the ten statements for that trait from the quick test’s item set, exactly as published, and scores them the same way: flip the reversed items, average, then move the average onto the 0 to 100 scale. The introvert or extrovert test uses the 24 Extraversion statements of the IPIP-NEO-120, the same ones the full test uses, and also scores its six facets.

No new statements were written for these quizzes. Results use the same three bands as the rest of the site: 0 to 34 is lower, 35 to 65 is the middle and 66 to 100 is higher. On the introvert test those bands are labelled “lean introvert”, “ambivert” and “lean extrovert”. The bands are simple cut-offs on the scale, not research categories or norms.

How does the Enneagram quiz work?

The Enneagram test is the one quiz on this site that does not use IPIP items. Its statements were written by us in 2026, fresh from the ideas behind each of the nine types, and checked by a second, separate review. Each type has the same number of statements. A type’s score is the average of its answers on the same 0 to 100 scale. Your main type is the highest score, and your likely wing is the stronger of the two types next to it on the circle. The Enneagram is not a scientifically validated measure, so we call it a self-reflection quiz. Read more about the nine Enneagram types.

What are the scores not?

• Not percentiles. A 70 does not mean you beat 70 percent of people. We do not use comparison norms.
• Not comparable across tests. Scores from other questionnaires use other items and scales.
• Not a diagnosis. Nothing here measures any health condition, including the Neuroticism score.
• Not for selection. The test must not be used to hire, rank, grade or judge people.

What are the limits of any self-report test?

A questionnaire can only reflect what you report. Results depend on honest answers, on how well you know yourself, on your mood that day and on how you read each statement. Culture and language matter too: a word like “party” or “abstract” can mean slightly different things to different people. Treat your result as a thoughtful snapshot, and trust the scores more than the letters when they sit near the middle.

Where do my answers go?

Scoring happens in your browser. Your progress and results are saved in your browser’s local storage so you don’t lose them, and nothing you answer is sent to us. Share links put your scores after a # sign, the part of an address that browsers do not send to the server. There are no accounts. See the privacy policy for how analytics and advertising work on this site.

What are the five traits, in one line each?

• Openness (curiosity and imagination): How much you enjoy new ideas, art, change and big “what if” questions.
• Conscientiousness (organization and self-discipline): How much you plan ahead, keep order and push yourself to finish things.
• Extraversion (social energy): How much energy you get from people, activity and excitement.
• Agreeableness (warmth and cooperation): How much you put kindness, trust and getting along ahead of competing and challenging.
• Neuroticism (emotional sensitivity): How strongly you feel stress, worry and other difficult emotions. It is not a measure of any health condition.

More detail is in our guide to the Big Five.

References

• Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4, 26–42.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt, & F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe, Vol. 7 (pp. 7–28). Tilburg University Press.
• Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96.
• Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89.
• McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1989). [Article comparing a widely used four-letter type questionnaire with the five-factor model]. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17–40.
• International Personality Item Pool: A Scientific Collaboratory for the Development of Advanced Measures of Personality Traits and Other Individual Differences. ipip.ori.org.