Can Orthopaedic Residents Beat a Personality Assessment?

Selection of residents is a challenging process. The use of personality inventories to evaluate applicants has been validated in professions outside of healthcare. It has been shown that job applicants could not game the personality evaluation.

The purpose of this study was to determine if orthopaedic surgery residents could game the personality assessment to make themselves seem like a better fit for orthopaedic surgery residencies.

In 2017, 20 orthopaedic surgery residents at a single program were administered a validated personality assessment twice. On one occasion, they were instructed to answer honestly. On the other, they were instructed to shade their answers in a way that they would want a program to see them. Assessments were scored on 9 scales to determine how many were modified to a more desirable result based on previously determined results for desirability of orthopaedic residents.

Nineteen of 20 subjects had at least one of the nine scales that was "undesirable" when taking the test honestly. The average was 2.1. Forty-two out of a possible 180 results were "undesirable" when the test was taken honestly. 41 of the 42 became desirable when the subjects were instructed to shade their answers.

Orthopaedic surgery residents were able to modify their answers to a personality assessment enough to hide most "red flag" findings when they were instructed to shade questions toward answers they thought would be desirable by a program. This limits the utility of personality assessments as screening tools for residency applications.