8.2 Responding Honestly: Why Trying to Look Good Lowers Your Score
Key Takeaways
- The personality section is built so that dishonest responding aimed at looking good results in lower scores.
- Response patterns such as using only the extreme ends of the scale are flagged by the examination and reduce your score.
- The publisher states directly that testimonials and advice claiming these strategies work are ill-informed.
- Honest responding according to your own thoughts, feelings and opinions is described as the best strategy, without qualification.
- Overanalysing a statement or hunting for hidden meaning causes misunderstanding and a response that does not reflect your real attributes.
8.2 Responding Honestly: Why Trying to Look Good Lowers Your Score
Search for advice on police personality tests and you will find a great deal of it. Answer as the ideal officer. Never admit to stress. Always pick the strongest agreement with anything positive. Avoid the middle of the scale.
The publisher of this examination addresses that advice directly, and the passage is worth reading in full because it is unusually explicit for a test manual:
"This section of the examination has been developed so that responding in a dishonest manner to 'look good' or to 'game' the test will result in lower scores. For example, in Part 1 of this section, strategies such as using only extreme parts of the scale (using only '1s' and '5s') or other 'patterns' are flagged by the examination, and will result in lower scores. We caution all test takers to avoid any such strategies. Any information, resources or testimonials that you may encounter suggesting that these types of strategies are successful are ill-informed. Following this ill-informed advice will likely result in the lowering of your score, impacting your chance of passing the New York State Police Trooper Examination."
Three claims are being made there, and each has a practical consequence.
1. Faking Good Is Detected and Penalised
Personality inventories used in high-stakes selection are built with the expectation that candidates want the job. Standard construction techniques include items that almost nobody can truthfully endorse at the extreme, items whose social desirability is not obvious from the wording, and consistency checks across statements that measure the same tendency in different language.
The practical consequence: a candidate who answers every item as the person he imagines the Division wants produces a profile that is internally inconsistent and improbably favourable — and that profile scores worse than an honest one, including an honest one that admits ordinary human limitations.
Consider the sample statement "When I get home from work or school, I usually feel stressed." A candidate playing a character rejects it flatly, because stress sounds like weakness. But there is no reason to think the scored trait rewards denial here; what the item measures is a tendency, not a virtue, and a person who never carries any feeling home from a demanding job is not obviously a better hire than one who does. You do not know which direction is favourable, and guessing at it is how faking is detected.
2. Response Patterns Are Flagged
The guide singles out one strategy by name: using only the extreme ends of the scale. Some candidates believe that emphatic responses signal conviction and that neutral responses signal indecision.
That is wrong on this test. Exclusive use of Strongly Disagree and Strongly Agree is a pattern, and patterns are flagged and penalised. Other patterns behave the same way:
| Pattern | Why it is a problem |
|---|---|
| Only extremes (A and E) | Explicitly named by the publisher as flagged and score-lowering |
| Only neutral (C) throughout | Produces no measurement and reads as non-responsive |
| Straight-lining a single option | The same failure in a different form |
| Alternating in a repeating cycle | A mechanical pattern rather than a self-report |
The corollary is a permission that anxious candidates need to hear: using the middle of the scale is fine. Neutral exists because some statements genuinely do not describe you either way, and Disagree is a normal answer to a statement you disagree with. A real person's responses spread across the scale. Let yours.
3. Overanalysis Produces Wrong Answers
The section's tips include a second warning, distinct from the faking issue:
"A good guideline for answering these types of items is to put down the first response that feels right. Overanalyzing the statement or looking for hidden meaning can often cause you to misunderstand the statement and respond in a manner that does not reflect your true behavioral attributes."
This is a measurement point rather than an ethics point. A statement read plainly means one thing; the same statement read for four minutes while you construct scenarios in which it might be a trap means something else, and your answer then describes the scenario you invented rather than your actual disposition.
Take each statement at face value, in its ordinary meaning, and answer it. If it seems ambiguous, answer for the ordinary case rather than the edge case you can imagine.
4. The Consistency Point
Because well-built inventories re-ask the same underlying tendency in different words, honesty is also the only strategy that is sustainable across 85 items in 20 minutes.
Maintaining a fabricated persona requires remembering how the character answered every previous related item and reproducing it consistently — under a fourteen-second-per-item clock. Nobody does that reliably. Honest responding needs no memory at all, because you are simply reporting the same self each time.
5. What Honest Responding Actually Means
It does not mean volunteering your worst qualities or answering self-critically to appear humble. That is a strategy too, and a poor one.
It means:
- Read the statement once, in its plain meaning.
- Notice your immediate reaction — do you agree, disagree, or neither?
- Record that reaction at the strength you actually feel it: Strongly Agree when you genuinely feel strongly, Agree when you mildly agree, Neutral when it truly does not apply.
- Move to the next item without revisiting.
The publisher's own summary sentence: "Responding honestly according to your personal thoughts, feelings, or opinions is the best strategy."
6. On Third-Party Preparation Products
The guide's language here is notably strong: testimonials and resources claiming that gaming strategies succeed are "ill-informed," and following them "will likely result in the lowering of your score."
That does not make all outside preparation worthless. Cognitive-ability practice is genuinely useful, and the publisher itself points candidates toward grammar, spelling and vocabulary workbooks and toward materials for its NCJOSI2 and LST examinations. The warning is specific to products that promise to teach you how to answer the personality section "correctly." There is no correct answer to teach, and the attempt is detected.
7. The Practical Takeaway
The personality attributes section is the one part of the Trooper Examination where preparation consists of understanding the format and then declining to strategise. Learn the two item types from section 8.1, know that the clock is fast, know that patterns are flagged, and then answer as yourself.
Every hour you would have spent trying to reverse-engineer the scoring key is better spent on memorization drills, where the ten-item block responds directly to practice — and where the effort actually raises your rank.
A candidate reads online that police personality tests reward decisiveness, so he resolves to use only "Strongly Disagree" and "Strongly Agree" throughout Part 1, avoiding the middle of the scale entirely. What is the likely result?
A candidate encounters the statement "When I get home from work or school, I usually feel stressed." She genuinely does often feel stressed after work but worries that agreeing will make her look unsuitable. What should she do?
A candidate spends four minutes on a single Part 1 statement, constructing scenarios in which it might mean something other than its plain sense. Beyond the time cost, why does the publisher warn against this?