Our test is based on IPIP-NEO-60, a 60-item personality inventory developed by Maples-Keller and colleagues. Same scientific foundation as the proprietary instruments.
IPIP-NEO-60 is a short-form personality inventory built from the International Personality Item Pool, a collaborative scientific project started by Lewis R. Goldberg in 1996. The pool contains thousands of items measuring personality traits, developed across dozens of labs over several decades.
The 60-item version was developed by Maples-Keller, Williamson, Sleep, Carter, Campbell, and Miller, and published in the Journal of Personality Assessment in 2019. Their paper used item response theory to select the two best-performing items per facet, producing a tight short form with strong psychometric properties.
A peer-reviewed alternative to the proprietary five-factor inventories. Same science. Shorter runtime.
It measures five broad factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) and 30 narrower facets, six per factor. Total time to complete: roughly 5 minutes.
Each broad trait breaks down into six narrower facets. Your results show all 30, so you see exactly where you fall on each dimension instead of a single averaged score.
The people and papers behind the instrument. Knowing the chain of work matters when you're trusting a test with something as personal as your profile.
Goldberg, one of the founders of the five-factor model, launches the International Personality Item Pool as a scientific commons. Every item is placed in the public domain. The goal: to free personality measurement from proprietary licenses and let science move faster.
Johnson develops a 300-item IPIP-NEO inventory modeled on the proprietary NEO-PI-R's structure. It becomes the gold standard for researchers who need the depth of a facet-level inventory without the license fee.
Johnson releases the IPIP-NEO-120 in the Journal of Research in Personality, selecting the four best-performing items per facet from the 300-item version. A shorter inventory, nearly identical psychometric properties.
A team led by Jessica Maples-Keller publishes the IPIP-NEO-60 in the Journal of Personality Assessment. Using item response theory, they select the two strongest items per facet, producing a five-minute instrument that still captures all 30 facets with strong convergence to the longer forms.
The IPIP-NEO family appears in hundreds of published studies, replicates reliably across cultures and languages, and is the default choice for researchers who need a validated instrument without license fees.
When Goldberg created the IPIP, he made a deliberate choice: every item, every scale, every facet would be placed in the public domain. No copyright. No royalties. No paperwork.
That decision changed personality research. Instead of paying per-administration fees to use a proprietary instrument, researchers could download items, run studies, and publish results without any licensing layer. It's part of why the five-factor model is now the most-used framework in the field.
For you, as a test-taker, it means exactly this: the same science you'd pay $40 to access through a proprietary test is available, for free, because a handful of researchers chose open over closed. We pass that directly to you.
“The IPIP is in the public domain and its items can be freely downloaded... Both researchers and practitioners have free access to this instrument.”
A quick look at what happens between your last answer and your results card.
You respond on a 7-point agreement scale. Reverse-keyed items (where agreeing means a lower trait score) are flipped automatically during scoring.
Every facet is measured by two items selected via item response theory. Your facet score is the combined answer, placed on a standardized scale so 50 is average.
Each of the five broad traits is the composite of its six facets. That's why the factor-level scores are more reliable than any single question response.
Your raw score is compared to reference data from tens of thousands of prior takers, which is how we place you on a percentile and label bands (low, moderate, high).
The primary sources. If you want to verify anything on this page, start here.
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