Test Partnership has just launched a brand new series of gamified assessments designed to measure specific cognitive abilities linked to job performance. MindmetriQ comprises six unique, fully mobile gamified assessments developed using the latest advances in psychometric science. MindmetriQ’s fun and engaging design also delivers an excellent candidate experience, helping to minimise test anxiety and reduce candidate attrition.
About MindmetriQ
To capitalise on the advantages that gamification offers when designing cognitive ability tests, Test Partnership has launched the MindmetriQ series of scientific gamified ability tests. This series comprises six unique games, each designed to measure a range of cognitive abilities essential to the workplace. When all six games are completed and their scores are aggregated, this provides a superior measure of general cognitive ability. The construct validity achieved by MindmetriQ is in fact better than that achieved by many traditional ability tests (see below).
MindmetriQ holds several advantages over traditional ability tests and most other suites of gamified assessments, which include the following:
Benefit 1: More Valid and Reliable
The biggest advantage of the MindmetriQ series over other gamified assessments is its use of computer adaptive testing (CAT). CATs dynamically adapt the difficulty of the assessment to match the specific ability of each candidate. As a result, the assessment gets slightly harder after each correct answer, and slightly easier with each incorrect answer, homing in on the candidate’s true level of ability. This ensures that each candidate receives the optimal set of questions for their ability level, significantly improving reliability. The CAT nature of MindmetriQ has the added advantage of being far more secure and difficult to cheat on, as each candidate receives a unique combination of questions. The MindmetriQ series achieves construct validity with other general ability measures ranging from r=0.53 to 0.69, p<0.001, which is in line with industry best practice. Reliability of the MindmetriQ series achieves a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.7, which is also in line with industry best practice.
Benefit 2: More Engaging and Stress Free
The most obvious advantage of gamified assessments is candidate engagement and attraction. This is inevitably what initially peaks the interest of HR professionals and hiring managers. At their best, traditional ability tests aren’t fun to complete, and at their worst they can cause serious test anxiety in nervous candidates. Gamified assessments are designed to be significantly more fun and far less stressful than traditional assessments, and MindmetriQ receives excellent candidate feedback (our research found that 81% of candidates (n = 322) reported MindmentriQ to be less anxiety provoking than when compared to traditional, non-gamified assessments). This helps employing organisations avoid candidate attrition, improve candidate experience, and encourage candidates to speak positively about the recruitment process to others.
Benefit 3: More Inclusive and Fair
MindmetriQ has undergone both traditional adverse impact analysis and new advanced differential item functioning (DIF) analysis. This ensures that any questions that show bias against any gender, ethnic group, or age group, are instantly identified and can be removed from the item banks. And since MindmetriQ is fully mobile enabled, this helps support socioeconomic diversity as well. Assessments that only function with a laptop or desktop computer unfairly disadvantage candidates that don’t have immediate access to those devices, which are increasingly being supplanted by mobile technology. MindmetriQ works seamlessly across mobile, desktop, laptop and, which increases accessibility and supporting socioeconomic diversity.
The Rationale Behind Gamified Assessment
Gamification offers several key benefits when measuring cognitive abilities. Research clearly shows that the greater the cognitive complexity of the task, the more effectively that task measures general cognitive ability (the most powerful predictor of job performance). Gamification allows us to increase task complexity far beyond what would normally be possible using the fixed, static images employed in traditional ability tests. Not only does this allow us to create tasks which are more cognitively complex, it also allows us to create a wider range of tasks, which is equally important in measuring general cognitive ability. The ideal cognitive ability assessment comprises a large number of distinct cognitive tasks, and gamification is very good at letting us create a wide range of cognitively complex tasks which can be completed quickly and conveniently online.
Bringing Real Science to Gamification
Many existing attempts at gamification have been great as attraction tools, but they lack scientific rigour. For example, most other gamified assessments issue the exact same questions or puzzles to each candidate, rather than employing a more advanced item banking methodology. As a result, this makes it incredibly easy to cheat on these assessments, making them unsuitable for unsupervised online testing. MindmetriQ brings positive psychometric progress to gamification by using large item banks and adaptive test technology.
Many gamified assessments use nebulous black-box algorithms, which claim to use thousands of datapoints per candidate when predicting performance. Almost always, these datapoints offer no real predictive power; they simply highlight chance correlations in random data. This represents an egregious violation of the parsimony principle in statistics but sounds impressive to the uninitiated, and thus ironically is used in marketing literature.
To bring real science to the world of gamified assessments, Test Partnership has developed MindmetriQ, a truly scientific approach to gamification in ability testing.
About Test Partnership
Test Partnership is an innovative psychometric test publisher based in London, specialising in advanced computer adaptive assessments for employee selection. By combining cutting edge science with market-leading technology, Test Partnership aims to radically transform the candidate assessment space, improving quality per hire while streamlining the recruitment process itself.
Our assessment offering includes the following:
- MindmetriQ™, gamified assessments
- Insights™, traditional ability tests
- Perceptions™, situational judgement tests
- The Test Partnership Adaptive Questionnaire (TPAQ), personality questionnaires
For more information on Test Partnership or their assessment offering, please visit their website at https://www.testpartnership.com/ or contact them at info@testpartnership.com
