Good Example Of Research Paper On Evaluation Of The Aptitude Test

Every year thousands of students graduate from schools and face the necessity to choose a wise next step towards the adult life. The responsibility for the choice lies not only on the teenagers, but also on their parents and teachers, who are the most reliable assistants in making a decision about a future path. Many schools and testing centers offer a range of tests that are supposed to estimate the skills and interests of a student and guide him or her in the world of opportunities. The vast majority of these tests are created by the professionals in psychology, management, education and other related disciplines, thus adding extra credibility to the test’s results. Most of the online tests, to the contrary, are superficial and can only guide a person in the sphere of interests and skills, without giving any explanation of the meaning of the scores and further assistance in choosing the cluster of jobs the person might want to consider in future. Whether the test is useful or not depends on the number of conditions, including the place and time of the test, the attitude of the student and educator towards it, the professional level of the test, its complexity, clarity, structure. This taken into account, the aptitude tests can be considered useful for the high-school students, who are deciding on their future, but only upon the compliance with the requirements that make the test stand out from the pool of the non-professional tests that suggest no personal approach and no following guidance from the teacher.
The aptitude test suggested by the LiveCareer.com can serve a good example of the free online skills and interests test. Easy to grasp, it gives the person an opportunity to choose between three statements: only one that suits the person the most and the one that suits the least. Students, who will decide to take this test, will have to go through 100 blocks of statements, some blocks containing strange and sometimes contradictory options, and some of the options might be hard to understand, as they lack any interconnection. One can conclude that although advertised as a professional aptitude test, it is an easy to pass questionnaire that seems to lack a deep insight. Such online tests do not usually suggest any hints about the direction the student should take to find a dream profession.
The attraction to the free online tests can be explained by its accessibility; however, as an outcome the person receives the results that only outline the person’s interests and skills. As a consequence, the person is left with usually not very new information about himself or herself that ideally should be transformed into the useful knowledge helping the student make decisions about the future career. The best way to do that is to invite a third party to evaluate the test and the student, explain the meaning of the results and suggest the future actions, like self-development in a certain area of studies or transition to different career plans. Asking a teacher to evaluate the results of the test may prevent any misconceptions the student might get about his personality and, thus, any disappointments or false expectations.
The aptitude tests are widely advertised as showing the way to success. The non-professional developers and sellers, however, do not usually explain the way the tests are constructed. The ‘normal’ results are simply an average score that the developers received from the testing group; although allowing a deviation, they simply cannot have a personal approach towards every person, who takes the test. As a result, young people receive a ‘normal’ result for the answers, and instead of pursuing own goals and dreams, they might fall into the self-delusion and create a new false ideal person they want to become, a person that might not reflect their true personality.
The importance of the parents’ and teachers’ help after the student took the test lies in the usual inability of a student to conduct a valid self-assessment. As a rule, the students, who take the aptitude tests, either already know or have an idea who they want to be, or they do not have any clue on this matter. If the test results coincide with the desires of the student, the outcome might be great for the self-esteem and self-belief of the teenager. To the contrary, if the results are opposite or do not cover the student’s interests, the test might affect the person in a negative way by making him or her lose confidence in the relevance and importance of his own desires, interests or skills that have not yet develop to its fullest extent. Of course, a good teacher or parent should always help a student keep it real and focus on the natural skills he or she possesses, however, the puberty age might increase the negative effect of the misinterpreted results. To avoid it a student should be suggested to take the aptitude test at the professional institution that will guarantee a thorough analysis of each case and provide a valuable advice about the future development of a teenager.
The benefits of the aptitude tests are that they can show a student the overall picture of the abilities and interests he or she has. This can help a person understand himself or herself better and discover new ways for self-development. At the same time the skills and interests are not a constant; they change during the lifetime with new experiences a person gets. Thus, one should not rely on any tests in taking decisions about own future, as they are a minimal help, a hint that can show one of many sides of the multi-sided personalities that the students are. Teachers need to explain to the students that the final word rests with the latter, and no superficial evaluation of their abilities can dictate the future. If a student takes the aptitude test, he or she needs to be advised to turn to other tests and types of assessment of the abilities as well. Despite the advantages of the professionally prepared tests and the information they can give to the high-school teenager, he students need to be prepared that in real life what really matters is the development of the skills, rather than the simple acknowledgement of their existence, as, if the student fails to develop the skills praised in him by the test, and eventually is not able to put them into practice, the advantage of having these skills will be null.