AbilityBenchFree format demo, 10 statements answered twice
The three inventories behind a Hogan assessment report
Three separate inventories usually arrive under one invitation: one covering how you come across day to day, one covering what changes when you are under pressure, and one covering what you want out of a workplace. This page is free, needs no account, and does not score any of them — it explains what each one lists in a report and then hands you the one thing a practice page can honestly measure about a rating inventory, which is how far your own answers move when you fill it in as a candidate rather than as yourself. Twenty ratings, no clock, and the difference between the two passes printed in scale points.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 3 inventories explained
- 20 ratings
- No profile produced
Ten statements, answered twice, and the difference measured
The personality half of this assessment family is a normative inventory: you rate statements about yourself, and each scale is scored on its own without reference to the others. That structure has one visible consequence, which is that every statement has an answer that plainly looks better to an employer. So the useful question is not whether the format can be pushed. It is how far, and this measures that on you.
You will see the same ten statements twice. The first time, answer them accurately. The second time, answer them the way you would in a process you wanted to survive. The page then reports the distance between the two sets of answers, in the only units it has — rating-scale points on your own responses.
- Twenty ratings in total, no clock, and nothing is timed or recorded.
- No scale score comes out of this. The five groupings it reports by are this page’s own labels, chosen so nothing here can be mistaken for a published scale.
Where the eleven derailer scales came from
The most-quoted piece of this assessment family is not the bright-side inventory but the one about what a person does under pressure, and its scales were derived by taking the themes in the personality-disorder axis of the psychiatric manual of the time and asking what each looks like in somebody who is functioning well and employed — Hogan & Hogan (2001), Assessing leadership: A view from the dark side, International Journal of Selection and Assessment. That is a construction history rather than a clinical claim: the inventory is not a diagnostic instrument, its publisher says so, and this page does not score it.
How to use the two-pass demonstration
Answer accurately, then answer as an applicant, then read the gap.
Rate the ten statements as things actually are
Each statement is deliberately written so the flattering direction is obvious, because that is the property a normative rating inventory cannot avoid. Answer them as accurately as you can anyway: this first pass is the baseline everything else is measured against, and a baseline you have already inflated leaves the demonstration nothing to show. Every rating is a button, so nothing here needs a keyboard or a mouse in particular.
Answer the same ten again as the person filling in the form on Thursday
The set comes round a second time in the same order. This time you are a candidate who wants the job and knows somebody will read the output. The two passes are kept on separate screens on purpose — published faking studies administer the honest and the instructed condition separately, and putting both columns in front of you at once invites you to construct the difference you think you should produce rather than the one you would.
Read the share of the room you used, not the raw lift
The panel reports three figures: the lift in scale points, the count of statements you pushed to the top of the scale, and the share of the distance that was still available above your honest mean. The third is the one that means something. Somebody who answered honestly near the ceiling has almost nothing left to give, so their small lift is a large fraction of what was possible, and ranking two people by raw lift alone puts them in the wrong order.
Technical specifications
| Statements | 10, written for this page, two in each of five groupings: staying level under pressure, finishing what was started, being easy to bring a problem to, trying an unfamiliar approach, and working inside an agreed process |
|---|---|
| Response format | A 5-point rating from not like me to very like me, the format the real personality inventories in this family use. Not forced choice — that belongs to a different publisher and has its own page here |
| Ratings collected | 20: the same 10 statements in two separately instructed passes, presented on separate screens rather than side by side |
| Figures reported | Lift in scale points, share of the available room used, statements at the ceiling before and after, statements left untouched, and the move within each of the five groupings |
| Groupings | This page's own labels, not scales from any published inventory. Nothing here maps onto the seven, eleven and ten scales the three real inventories report |
| Scoring against a norm | None. There is no percentile, no band and no comparison with other visitors, because the norms for this assessment family are published only to licensed customers |
| Clock | There is none, and no figure on this page is in milliseconds. The real personality inventories in this family are untimed too; the timed part of a Hogan process, where there is one, is a separate cognitive measure |
| Published comparison figure | An instructed-faking shift of roughly 0.4 to 0.7 between-person standard deviations, from Viswesvaran & Ones (1999), Meta-analyses of fakability estimates: Implications for personality measurement, Educational and Psychological Measurement. Printed beside your own figure with both units named, never subtracted from it |
Frequently asked questions
Can you fail a Hogan assessment?
There is no pass mark, because there is no single score to set one against. Each inventory reports a set of scale scores rather than a total, and what an employer does with them depends on a profile it has decided in advance suits the role — so the same set of scores can be read as a fit for one job and a risk for another. What does happen is that a recruiter reads the report alongside everything else in your file, and that some scales are read as cautions in some roles: a very high score on a scale about attention to detail is a virtue in an auditing job and a warning in a role that has to ship weekly. None of that is a fail, and none of it is decided by arithmetic.
Which of the three inventories will I be given?
Frequently all three, in one sitting, which is why the invitation often quotes a long completion time. The bright-side inventory is the one most processes include; the pressure-side one appears most often for leadership and development work, because that is where a derailer costs an employer real money; the values one appears when the question is cultural fit rather than capability. If the invitation mentions development rather than selection, the pressure-side inventory is almost certainly in the set, and the report is more likely to be discussed with you afterwards.
Is there a time limit, and does answering quickly hurt me?
The personality inventories in this family are untimed, and speed is not scored. What is worth knowing is that a very fast completion produces a recognisable pattern rather than a low score: long strings of identical answers, and reverse-worded item pairs answered the same way, are exactly the patterns a response-consistency check is built to notice. So the risk of rushing is not that the clock catches you but that the arithmetic does. Reading each statement once and answering it is enough; deliberating over each one for a minute adds nothing.
Should I answer as my work self or my whole self?
Answer as your work self, because that is the frame the items were written in and validated against. Statements in these inventories are about behavior in an occupational setting, and reading them as questions about your private life produces a profile of somebody who does not exist at the office. This is not the same as answering as an idealised employee: the difference is between choosing the right context and choosing the right answer. If a statement genuinely has different answers at work and at home, the work one is the one being asked for.
Does the pressure-side inventory mean the employer is screening for a disorder?
No, and the history of the instrument is the reason the question comes up. Its eleven scales were derived by taking the themes in the personality-disorder axis of the psychiatric manual of the time and asking what each looks like in somebody functioning well and holding a job — an ambitious person, an alert person, a careful person. The publisher states that the result is not a clinical instrument, and it is not administered as one. What an employer is looking at is a set of tendencies that become liabilities under stress, which is a management question rather than a medical one.
I have taken one of these before and the report was different. Which one is real?
Both are readings of the same person by an instrument with finite precision, and the gap between them is mostly the instrument. A questionnaire scale estimates a position from a limited number of items, and a limited number of items pins that position down to a range rather than to a point — so two administrations that disagree by a modest amount have not caught you changing, they have shown you the width of the range. The demonstration on the page about work inventories generally puts a number on that directly, by reporting the same estimate at five different questionnaire lengths.
Will practising these items improve my report?
It will not, and this page does not claim otherwise. There is no skill being drilled here: a statement about whether you plan your week has no correct answer to learn, and repeating it does not move anything except your familiarity with the format. What the two passes above are for is a different and more useful outcome — seeing for yourself how much of the output is under your control, so that you go in with a realistic idea of what the report will be based on. The exercises on this site that practice genuinely helps are the ones with right answers and a clock.
What each of the three inventories lists, and why there is no average to compare with
The three inventories divide the same person along three axes and are reported separately. The bright-side one covers how you come across when things are going normally and lists seven primary scales, with a further set of role-oriented composites built on top of them. The pressure-side one covers what happens when you are stretched and lists eleven, each one a tendency that helps at moderate levels and starts costing you at high ones. The values one lists ten, and it is the odd one out: it is not about capability at all but about what you want an employer to be like, which is why it turns up when the question is fit rather than competence. A report puts those alongside each other, which is the point — a person who is ambitious and careful reads very differently from a person who is ambitious and impatient, and no single scale carries that.
The eleven scales on the pressure-side inventory have a genuinely interesting derivation and it is worth knowing before the report lands, because the scale names are strange enough to be alarming out of context. They were built by taking the themes in the personality-disorder axis of the psychiatric manual of the period and asking what each one looks like in somebody who is employed and functioning — Hogan & Hogan (2001), Assessing leadership: A view from the dark side, International Journal of Selection and Assessment. That is a construction history, not a diagnosis: the resulting inventory is not a clinical instrument and its publisher does not present it as one. What survives from the derivation is the shape of the scales, which is why every one of them describes a strength turned up too far rather than a deficit.
There is no average report to show you next to your own, and the reason is worth knowing before somebody sells you one. This publisher norms by role and by comparison group, releases the tables only to certified users, and requires a qualification course before anybody may read a report at all — so a general-population average for these scales does not exist in a form a website could quote even if it were free to. That is why this page reports no percentile and no band, and why the demonstration it does run is about the format rather than about you. That demonstration has an honest limit worth stating: showing that you can move your own answers does not show that moving them helps. The publisher’s own argument is the opposite one — that an applicant presenting the best plausible version of themselves is displaying the same self-presentation their colleagues will meet, so it is part of what the inventory measures rather than noise in it, and Hogan & Holland (2003), Using theory to evaluate personality and job-performance relations: A socioanalytic perspective, Journal of Applied Psychology makes that case against criterion data. The finding that settles the practical half sits on the page about work inventories in general: correcting scores for how desirably somebody answered has not been shown to improve prediction. If the same process has also sent you a paper with a clock on it, that is where preparation actually pays — the mixed drill finds the question type that costs you minutes, and the adaptive battery page explains why your second question got harder. The forced-choice format, which this family does not use, has its own page and a different trade-off entirely.
This is a measurement exercise, not a clinical assessment. It reports what you did on this page against a stated reference and nothing more — it cannot establish a personality disorder, a derailment risk, or any trait an inventory would name. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Hogan Assessment Systems, Inc.. Hogan is a trademark of its owner and is used here only to name the assessment this page prepares for. The questions on this page are our own: no part of the published test is reproduced, and a score here is not comparable to a score from the real instrument.
Where your twenty ratings are kept
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Your answers, your reaction times and your score are never uploaded, logged or kept — which is also why the test carries on working after you disconnect from the network, and why nothing here can be held back behind an email address.
Specific to this page: both passes exist only as numbers in this tab, and the comparison between them is computed where you are reading it. Nothing is compared against other visitors because nothing about other visitors is here to compare against, and a reload discards both passes rather than resuming them.