The instrument
MyTraitMap administers the 50-item IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers, developed by Lewis R. Goldberg and published through the International Personality Item Pool. Ten items per factor, each rated on a five-point scale from Very Inaccurate to Very Accurate.
The IPIP is in the public domain. Its items may be used, copied, edited and translated by anyone, for any purpose, without permission or fee — a deliberate choice by its authors to keep personality measurement out from behind licences. We use the items verbatim and credit the source: the scoring key and the permission statement.
Items are interleaved rather than grouped by trait, and positively and negatively keyed items alternate — the presentation the IPIP itself recommends, because grouping items from one scale together encourages people to notice the pattern and answer uniformly, which shrinks the variance in the results.
Reverse keying, and why it is there
Some items are written so that agreement counts *against* the trait: "Don’t talk a lot" is a negatively keyed Extraversion item. Those answers are flipped before scoring, so a 5 becomes a 1, a 4 becomes a 2, and so on.
This is not a trick. It is a control for acquiescence bias — the well-documented tendency to agree with statements regardless of content. If every Extraversion item pointed the same way, a habitual agreer would score as an extravert. Mixing the direction means that habit largely cancels out.
The scoring arithmetic, in full
- Each answer is a whole number from 1 (Very Inaccurate) to 5 (Very Accurate).
- For a reverse-keyed item, the value used is 6 minus your answer.
- The ten values for a trait are summed, giving a raw total between 10 and 50.
- The total is rescaled to 0–100 with (total − 10) ÷ 40 × 100, then rounded to the nearest whole number.
No weighting, no adjustment, no comparison against anyone else. The five numbers are a direct arithmetic transformation of your fifty answers, and nothing else feeds into them. The scoring function is about a dozen lines long and is covered by unit tests.
Reliability: the published figures
Internal consistency for these ten-item scales, as reported by the IPIP for the Eugene-Springfield community sample on which the markers were developed:
| Scale (IPIP factor) | Cronbach’s alpha, 10 items |
|---|---|
| Extraversion (I) | .87 |
| Agreeableness (II) | .82 |
| Conscientiousness (III) | .79 |
| Emotional Stability (IV) — reported here, reversed, as Neuroticism | .86 |
| Intellect / Imagination (V) — reported here as Openness | .84 |
For comparison, the 20-item versions of the same scales reach .88 to .91. Doubling the length buys a few points of consistency and costs twice the time; the 50-item form is the standard trade-off, and it is the one this site takes.
Why there are no percentiles here
A percentile requires a norm sample: a group of people, of known composition, whose scores yours is ranked against. Norms are specific to language, age band, culture and often era, and a norm built from self-selected internet visitors is not representative of any population you would want to be compared to.
MyTraitMap has no norm sample, so it reports scale scores — where your answers sat on the response scale — and says so on the results page, on the shareable badge, and here. A percentile we could not defend would look more authoritative and mean less. Reading your scores explains how to interpret a scale score properly.
What this test cannot do
- It cannot diagnose anything. The Big Five is a model of normal personality variation. It is not a clinical instrument, and no score here indicates a disorder.
- It cannot be used to make decisions about other people. Not hiring, not promotion, not placement, not admission. A five-minute self-report questionnaire is not evidence about anyone’s suitability for anything.
- It cannot see through a deliberate answer. There is no lie scale. Answer as you wish you were and you will get a description of who you wish you were.
- It cannot resolve facets. Ten items produce one number per trait. Someone high on imagination and low on intellectual curiosity gets a middling Openness score that describes neither half well.
- It cannot be culture-neutral. The items are English-language and were developed on a US community sample. Translation and cross-cultural use change how the items behave.
- It cannot tell you what to do. It describes tendencies. What you make of them is not a psychometric question.
Privacy, and how the scoring runs
Your answers are scored by JavaScript in your own browser. They are held in memory for the duration of the tab, are not written to storage, and are cleared when you refresh or close it. No answer is transmitted to MyTraitMap, and there is no account to create.
You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and take the test: no request carries your answers, because there is nothing on the other end to receive them. A shared profile link and a downloaded badge contain your five scores — those you create deliberately, and only those five numbers travel.
Frequently asked
Is the IPIP-50 the same test as the NEO-PI-R?
No. They are separate instruments measuring the same five factors. The NEO inventories are commercial, much longer, and report facet scores; the IPIP markers are public domain, short, and report the five broad factors only. IPIP scales are constructed to correspond to established inventories, but a score on one is not interchangeable with a score on the other.
Why does this test call it Neuroticism when IPIP calls it Emotional Stability?
The same ten items, reported in the opposite direction. Goldberg’s scale scores steadiness; most Big Five research reports sensitivity. MyTraitMap reverses the scale so that a high score means greater emotional sensitivity, which is the convention readers are most likely to have met elsewhere.
Why is Openness described as Intellect and Imagination?
Because that is what Goldberg called Factor V, and it is an accurate label for what these particular ten items measure. This scale weights intellectual curiosity and imagination more heavily than aesthetic sensitivity and unconventional values, which the NEO Openness scale also covers.
How accurate is a 50-item personality test?
Accurate enough to be worth ten minutes of reflection, and not accurate enough to make a decision on. Internal consistency runs from .79 to .87. Treat differences under about ten points as noise, and trust the ordering of your five traits more than any single number.
Will I get the same result if I take it again?
Close, usually, but not identical. Expect a few points of movement on each trait, more on Neuroticism, which tracks recent circumstances. If a score moves twenty points, something real changed — your circumstances, your frame of reference, or how you read the questions.
Do you store my answers?
No. Scoring happens in your browser, answers are never transmitted, and they are cleared when you close or refresh the tab. There is no account and no database of results.
Sources
- Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. *Psychological Assessment*, 4, 26–42.
- International Personality Item Pool — 50-item Big-Five Factor Markers scoring key, with alpha coefficients.
- International Personality Item Pool — public-domain permission statement.
- Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis. *Personnel Psychology*, 44, 1–26.