How are personality test results calculated (weighted scoring)?

Calculating personality test results is a key part around creating a compelling personality test.

Let’s dive in and show how you can use Riddle’s weighted scoring to calculate personality test rests and attributes.

What is a personality quiz?

Online personality quizzes are powerful tools for diagnostic or assessment style quizzes.

The idea is there aren’t any right or wrong answers.

(You can read our in-depth guide for creating the perfect personality test.)

Instead, you create overall personality test results, then show each user the one that is the closest match for their responses.

Weighted scoring for more accurate personality test results

Riddle’s online quiz maker uses a subtle and sophisticated scoring method for our personality test.

Most quiz maker tools (like TryInteract) use a very simple linear mapping system:

• Choosing answer A for question 1 -> you would get matched to personality result A
• Choosing answer B -> you would be mapped to personality result B

The problem is that this assumes that every answer you map will apply equally to each personality test result.

We prefer to give you more flexibility with Riddle’s weighted scoring system.

After all, some answers might mean different things to different personality results.

Video: Setting up personality test results with Riddle

You can watch this overview of our quiz maker’s weighting works for personality test results:

Personality test example

Let’s imagine you’re an executive coach and you created a personality test called ‘What’s your management style?’.

We’ve created three overall personality test results:

1. Collaborative
2. Authoritarian
3. Mentoring

Now, there’s no ‘perfect’ type of manager – each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Ask situational questions for more accurate personality test results

You’ll want to ask situational questions in your personality test.

They’re more interested to the user while being harder for users to ‘game’ or predict how each answer relates to the possible outcome.

Compare these two questions:

• Traditional: “You are very comfortable in social situations.” [Choices range from ‘Strongly disagree’ to ‘Strongly agree’]
• Situational: “You’re at a cocktail party where you don’t know anybody – what do you do?” [‘Mingle’, ‘Find one person to chat to’, ‘Leave early’, etc.]

Riddle’s weighted personality test results

Once you’ve asked your 10-12 questions, you’ll need to decide how every answer reflects each of your personality test results.

You’ll want to open up the scoring editor in your personality test.

You have a range of 21 options for each choice – so you have maximum flexibility assigning personality test results:

• 0: No association
• 1-7: Weak association
• 8-14: Medium association
• 15-20: Strong association

At the end of your quiz, the user gets the particular personality test result with the most points.

For the ‘You’re leading the quarterly meeting’ question (from our ‘What’s your management style’ example), you could set up scoring like this:

We recommend balancing the scoring for each question.

This will ensure your audience has an equal chance of getting each of your personality test results.

Display multiple personality test results

Personality quizzes can be magical, insightful – and frankly, (delightfully) a little addictive.

We’ve seen quiz takers would take (and re-take) personality tests multiple times – just to see the range of possible outcomes.

You can show more than just the ‘winning’ personality test result.

Plus, you’ll have control about how to display the other results:

• Result title format – show results as %, points, or simply the title
• Columns – one column or two?
• Result images – show or hide the result images

Personality test results – low/medium/high variants (optional)

You can also create and show different versions of each personality test result – depending on the user’s score.

This only works if you’re displaying more than one result with our ‘show other results’ feature.

In addition to seeing their top overall outcome, you can display different result variants for each of their non-winning results.

We made three variants for the ‘Collaborative’ result.

Built with the ‘low/med/high’ result feature – we customized each of this personality test results with different text and images:

• 70-100%: Very collaborative
• 31-69%: Somewhat collaborative
• 0-30%: Not very collaborative

Let’s suppose a user got ‘Collaborative’ as their winning personality test result – but they also scored 28% on ‘Mentoring’ and 15% on ‘Authoritarian’.

Using the ‘Show other personality test results’ feature, they would see:

• Collaborative – ‘Winning result’ image and text
• Mentoring – ‘Low result’ image & text
• Authoritarian – ‘Low result’ image & text

This lets you craft personalized assessments for your audience.

Instead of showing a ‘one size fits all’ version to everyone, you can display more relevant versions – based on their personality test results.

Attributes – 2nd level of personality test results

Attributes are unique to Riddle’s quiz maker. You have the option to add an additional set of characteristics for your personality test results.

Attributes are independent of each personality result.

Instead, they let you provide additional insights to your audience about other key characteristics.

In our example ‘What’s your management style?’ personality test, you can see we created four attributes:

1. Responsible
2. Proactive
3. Organized
4. Decisive

A user who took our personality test might see their main result and attributes as:

Give low/medium/high attribute variants (optional)

We give you the same flexibility for low/medium/high variants with the attributes of your personality test.

This enables you to show the most accurate and relevant attribute results to each user.

Two ways to calculate personality test results

We love giving our quiz creators options at Riddle – and that extends to the scoring calculations behind personality test results.

Riddle’s personality test maker has two methods to calculate attributes and results.

1. Total points achieved across all personalities: all results %’s will add up to 100%
2. Max points possible for each personality: each result will be from 1-100%

Additional personality quiz resources

Want to learn more about making a powerful personality quiz?

Check out our other posts:

• ‘Creating the perfect online personality test’ – full of our team’s tips and best practices from years of quiz making.
• ‘Making a compelling personality test with Riddle’ – dive in and learn how to use Riddle’s personality test maker.
• Choosing the right personality test scoring calculation method – a detailed look at our two scoring methods for personality test results.
• Quizmaker (free e-book) – download our free .pdf e-book, chock full of insights and examples around creating insightful personality tests

Any questions about personality test results?

We make customer support our top priority at Riddle.

Forget auto-replies or delays in responses. Our entire team challenge each other to be first – you’ll get an answer in under two minutes*.

*Slight caveat – we are based in Europe, so we’ll be offline getting our beauty sleep (from 9pm to 7am German time / 3pm to 1am Eastern time).

Video transcript

(As an accessible online quiz creator, we like to also make sure our blog and help docs are easy to use with screen readers and other tools. So we add transcripts of any videos we embed – for people who like to use screen readers and similar software.)

Hi there… my name is Mike and I’m one of the cofounders here at Riddle. And in this video I’m going to give you a quick introduction on how your scoring is calculated for your personality tests, results and attributes.

Now at Riddle we use a more sophisticated weighted scoring system than many online quiz makers – that gives you a lot of control as a personal personality creator in determining what each answer means for your quiz takers.

Let’s take a look at the personality test creator.

This example is a personality test we created around management styles. And in this case you’ll see we have three personality results collaborative, authoritarian, and mentoring.

We also have four attributes which are kind of second level characteristics that are not linked to the result how organized are you and how responsible and how decisive and so on.

Now, once you create your results and attributes, you’ll then move on to writing questions. And this is where scoring comes in.

So in this case, our first question is around a hypothetical question asking “You’ll be leading the quarterly company meeting, what do you do?”

Now, we have three options: brainstorming, we can change strategy, or we can update everybody.

Each of these answers might apply to some degree to each of these three results and to each of these four attributes.

This is how you can adjust your scoring. You can click ‘Edit scoring’ down there or you can click the little brain icon and this opens up our scoring modal.

And with Riddle we use a scoring option where you can say, okay, based on the number of points at the end of the quiz, whatever result has the most points will be the winner.

In this case, you’ll see how I’ve actually used the scoring. So in this case about the quarterly meeting, if someone answers, “I’m going to say utilizing Brainstorming activities”, to me as a personality test creator, I’m going to ask myself  how much does that apply to a collaborative manager? And in this case it applies a lot because brainstorming embodies of what a collaborative manager does – getting feedback and input from everybody.

So I’m giving a very high number, I’m giving 20 points to this result.

Now for the same answer I go, okay, authoritarian, what does this mean? Does this reflect an authoritarian management style? And I’m going to say ‘Not really’. So I’m going to leave this at zero.

And then for mentoring, maybe it’s not quite as collaborative or as strong an affinity as collaborative, but I’m going to say 15 points. And you’ll see I do the same for each of these other answers. And at the end, this is just the best practice, you’ll see we have these totals.

We recommend in your personality test you want to balance the totals here so that the scores or each of these three results has a roughly equivalent chance of being given at the end of the results.

Imagine for example, I gave 20 points to authoritarian here, they would have 50 points possible versus 35 here. On average, quiz takers would then have a far more likely chance to have an authoritarian result.

That’s why you want to balance your quiz results.

But anyways, I digress. You would also do the same on attributes – asking ‘How much does this attribute apply to this particular answer choice?’

So if someone answers brainstorming, you could say that’s a very responsible managerial trait, I’m going to give them five points.

Maybe it’s not very decisive because brainstorming is more of a ‘hey, what do you think?’ way of operating. Whereas with decisive, you can potentially argue is more like ‘I’m going to make this decision’.

Here we go. But you’ll see I’ve given different points to different results based on how much I think each response aligns with that affinity or that attribute. So you’ll go through each score and just identify and assign scores.

When you get to the end of the test, this is where it gets a little interesting.

You’re going to see we have this results personality sections in the settings. Now this is where you have some control over how you display your results that the scores have just been calculated on. Now by default we show one result.

However, you have options.

You can actually decide – ‘Well actually, I want to show my quiz takers how they scored in their top result, but also how they scored on potential other options.’

As a best practice, we have found quiz takers love to see how they would score on all the different options. And we would find they would often retake the quiz multiple times to try and see what the other possible results are. So sometimes you might just say, you know what, I’m just going to show all the possible results.

In this case I’m going to show the other two results because I have three in total.

And then also down here in attributes, you can control how many to display. There is one final note.

You’ll see here we have two different ways scores are calculated. I’m going to include a link in this blog post if you want to go dive into a fuller explanation of this. But in this case we are going to use the default method and I’m going to pause this while I take this quiz.

Okay, so here we are.

I’ve gone through most of this personality test. I’m toward the end and I’ve been choosing answers that have a strong collaboration affinity. So in this case we get to the very end.

Here’s my main result saying, ‘Okay, of all the points that I accumulated through the test, 63% of them were for collaborative.’

That’s why ‘Collaborative’ is my winning result.

But because we’re using this extended scoring, I can also say, well, I got 33% for mentoring and only 4% for authoritarian. And you’ll see these add up to 100%.

Just for fun, here are the attributes. I got 51% for responsible and so on.

So that is how personality test scoring work.

If you have any questions though, please use our support chat for frequent listeners or viewers of these videos. You know how much we love to say we are super fast to respond if you send a message right now.

We based over in Europe, but as long as we’re awake, we answer generally within about two minutes.

And we’re so fast that people often ask, “Are you guys bots?”

Nope – we’re just really fast.

I should confess, there is a monthly beer coming competition involved. So all of our engineers and product team and myself, my co founder, we all race each other to be first.

Any questions about personality test scoring or anything quiz-related, please let us know. And happy riddling!