WSQ Format: Likert 1-5 Scale, 135 Items, No Traditional Right/Wrong Answers

What the WSQ is — and is not

The Work Styles Questionnaire is the second of the three NJ LEE components, sitting between the 30-item Cognitive Ability Test (CAT) and the 75-item Life Experience Survey (LES). It contains 135 statements about how you think, feel, and behave at work and in pressure situations. You do not solve problems, recall facts, or compute anything. You read a statement and mark how much you agree with it.

This is the key conceptual shift from the CAT: the WSQ is a self-report personality instrument, not a knowledge or reasoning test. There is no single correct answer to the statement I keep my cool when a situation turns hostile. The scoring engine does not look for one. Instead it builds a dimensional profile across the traits the instrument measures and compares that profile to a criterion profile derived from successful New Jersey law enforcement officers. Your score is a measure of fit between your profile and that criterion, not a count of right items.

The 5-point Likert scale

Every WSQ item uses the same response scale:

Some forms use slightly different labels (e.g. Very Inaccurate to Very Accurate when the statement is phrased as a self-description), but the 1-to-5 structure is the same. The numeric values are what the scoring engine reads; the labels exist so you can map your level of agreement onto the number.

Item structure

A WSQ item is a short, declarative statement. Most are written in the first person so you are agreeing or disagreeing with a claim about yourself. Examples of the shape of an item (not real items):

• I finish what I start, even when it takes weeks.
• I get along with people whose values are different from mine.
• I follow rules exactly, even when no one is checking.
• I stay calm when someone is shouting at me.

Notice that each statement is behavioral and self-referential. You are not being asked what the right thing to do is, or what a good officer would do — you are being asked what you actually do, think, or feel. The instrument is designed so that the honest answer to each statement, taken across 135 items, produces a profile that is stable and interpretable.

How the profile is assembled

The scoring engine does not total your 135 responses into one number. Instead it groups items by the trait they measure (covered in Section 4.2), reverse-scores any items that are worded in the opposite direction, and computes a score on each trait dimension. Those trait scores are then compared to the criterion profile. A candidate whose profile is close to the criterion on the dimensions that matter for law enforcement work scores well; a candidate whose profile is far off, or whose pattern looks faked, scores poorly or gets flagged for review.

This is why the WSQ has no traditional right or wrong answers but still has a scoring logic. The logic is does your pattern of self-reported behavior match the pattern that predicts success in NJ law enforcement roles. A single response does not determine that. The pattern across all 135 items does.

Why 'no right answer' is not 'no strategy'

A common mistake is to treat the WSQ as a personality quiz you can wing. It is not. The WSQ has a format, a scoring model, and built-in checks that reward certain kinds of responding and penalize others. Specifically:

• Consistency is scored. The same trait is measured by multiple items, some worded in opposite directions. Random or careless responding shows up as inconsistency and lowers your profile reliability.
• Extreme patterning is flagged. Answering 1 or 5 to almost every item is a known response style (acquiescence or extreme responding) and is picked up by the validity scales covered in Section 4.3.
• Faking good is detectable. Presenting yourself as flawless on every item is a recognizable pattern, and the instrument is designed to discount it.

The strategy section (4.4) walks through concrete responding rules. The point here is that the WSQ format — a Likert scale with no right answers — still rewards a candidate who understands how the instrument works and penalizes a candidate who treats it casually.

Timing and pacing

The NJ LEE gives you a 2.5-hour window for all three sections (CAT, WSQ, LES). The CAT is the gate — if you do not pass it, your WSQ and LES are not scored — so you must budget enough time for the CAT first. But the WSQ's 135 items take real time to read carefully. A reasonable pace is roughly 30-40 minutes for the WSQ, leaving the rest for the CAT and LES. Reading each statement fully before marking is important: many items are designed to look similar to a previous item but measure a different trait, and skimming leads to inconsistent patterns.