The MU Student Success Center is offering students the opportunity to take a personality test that will inform them of their personality strengths and help them academically.
StrengthsQuest, which has been offered for more than five years at MU, asks situational questions that require the student to answer with their gut instinct for the most accurate results.
According to a release from the MU News Bureau, 4,080 people completed the exam during the 2010-11 school year.
“The questions are structured so that you have two different statements and you have to say which one you agree with the most,” Student Success Center employee Allison Braun said. “You only have 20 seconds to answer the questions, so you have to go with your gut instincts for all of them.”
The test focuses on each student’s initial reaction to a question. If an answer is changed or if the student hesitates, the computer will factor that into the final report.
“It basically asked you questions about different situations,” freshman Jake Dugger said. “It really just helped you kind of figure out what kind of person you are and what kinds of things you’d be interested in career-wise.”
Upon completion of the test, a representative from the Student Success Center sits with the student to explain their results.
“I liked it because I thought it was a lot more personal than I thought a computer-generated test could be,” freshman Lucy Fuller said.
The purpose of the test is to allow students to focus on the strengths of their personality and make them more successful in all aspects of their life.
“It shows you what you’re good at in general,” Braun said. “It can be applied to careers, relationships, class selection, anything like that. They actually have a career portion of the assessment after you take it that you look at and it will give you career suggestions that fit in with those strengths, so if there’s an undecided (major) student coming in that’s definitely very helpful.”
The difference between StrengthsQuest and other career exploration tests is its focus on each student’s positive qualities as opposed to telling a student what they need to work on.
“People are realizing this language of focusing solely on weaknesses isn’t really beneficial for people,” Braun said.
Because of the newly found appreciation for academic strengths rather than a focus on students’ weaknesses, many classes are making Strengths Quest mandatory.
“I took it for my FIG (freshman interest group) class,” Dugger said. “I didn’t voluntarily do it, but it was interesting none the less. It was worth it. I’d say it really helped a lot to figure out who I am more and think about myself, because I never really had to do that before.”
The test has the ability to not only tell someone which careers would be a good choice for them, but also provides information on their personality.
“All of the results I got back were really accurate to my personality, I first thought that it would be really stupid, but it was actually really helpful,” freshman Kelsey Cummings said.