[cadandcookies]

I've taken a decent amount of personality tests over the past year or so in my university leadership courses, and I think one of the biggest benefits of taking them isn't that they're some sort of predictive measure of behavior oreven a good way to assign roles, but more that they promote self-awareness in how one shows up in a community, which, while something that comes intuitively so some people, is something I don't think many people take the time to actually think about. For students specifically, I feel like it might also be an interesting sort of formative tool-- for ones like MBTI or StrengthsFinder, answering and thinking about the questions the test asks you can serve as the basis for some good self-reflection, and can help one answer more thoroughly the question of "who do I want to be?"

Anyhow, I digress. Personally, I'm not a fan of institutional personality testing. I feel like having a test gives people far too much confidence in something as a predictive measure, especially in this case where you're taking an extremely complicated and multidimensional property ("personality") and trying to boil it into something useful using binary or stepped preferences. It's a compressive task, and you lose a lot of important stuff in the process.