The full 50-item public-domain Big Five inventory, scored across the five classic domains.
50 questions across 5 scales, about 10 minutes|Published scoring key from Big-Five Factor Markers, 50 items, not invented
Authors: Goldberg (1992), International Personality Item Pool
Licence: Public domain. Free to use, copy and modify without permission
How much stimulation and social contact you seek out, and how much energy you get back from it.
High. You start conversations, you're comfortable being noticed, and a busy room tends to charge you rather than drain you. Decisions get made out loud, often while you're still thinking.
Low. You rebuild your energy alone. Groups are manageable but they cost something, and you'd usually rather have one real conversation than six brief ones. Thinking happens before speaking, not during.
Whether your default stance toward other people is cooperative and trusting, or sceptical and competitive.
High. You assume good intent, you notice when someone is struggling, and you'd rather absorb a cost yourself than create a conflict. People tell you things.
Low. You judge claims on evidence rather than on who made them, and you're comfortable holding a position that makes a room uncomfortable. You negotiate for your own side without flinching.
How much you plan, organise and follow through rather than improvise. Of the five, this is the strongest predictor of performance at work and in study.
High. You have a system and you trust it. Deadlines are real to you, you finish what you start, and you'd rather be early than clever.
Low. You work in bursts and you'd rather keep options open than commit to a sequence. Structure feels like a cost, and you make up ground through speed rather than through planning.
How strongly and how often you experience negative emotion, and how long it takes to return to baseline. The inverse of emotional stability.
High. You feel things at full volume and difficult situations stay with you after they're over. You tend to see what could go wrong before anyone else does.
Low. Stress runs off you. You recover quickly after something goes badly, and pressure doesn't change your judgement much.
Appetite for ideas, novelty, art and abstraction. Often confused with intelligence, though it measures whether you enjoy thinking, not how well you do it.
High. Unfamiliar ideas attract you rather than unsettle you. You'd rather have a new problem than a solved one, and you notice aesthetic detail other people walk past.
Low. You back what is proven, concrete and already working. Theory for its own sake doesn't hold you; results do.
Question 1 of 50
How accurately does this describe you?
Am the life of the party.
The Big Five did not start as a theory. It started as a counting exercise. In the 1930s Allport and Odbert pulled roughly 18,000 personality-describing words out of an English dictionary, and for the next fifty years researchers kept factor-analysing how those words cluster when people rate themselves and each other. Five clusters kept reappearing across decades, across languages, across self- and peer-ratings.
That stability is the whole argument for the model. Nobody decided there should be five dimensions; five is what the data kept returning. The commercial inventories built on that finding, notably the NEO PI-R, are copyrighted and paid for. In 1999 Lewis Goldberg set up the International Personality Item Pool so equivalent items would exist in the public domain, and the 50 Big-Five Factor Markers used here come from that pool.
So this is not a free imitation of a real test. It is one of the instruments the research literature itself uses, with the scoring key published on the same page as the items.
50 answers
Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.
5 scales
Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.
A band
Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.
Each domain has ten items answered on a five-point accuracy scale. Reverse-keyed items are flipped (6 minus your answer) before summing, giving a raw score from 10 to 50 per domain. The bar shows where that raw score sits inside its own 10-50 range. It is not a percentile against a population.
Scoring runs in your browser from your own answers. It is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same result, and no part of it is generated, estimated or inferred.
Internal consistency for these ten-item scales, as published on ipip.ori.org, is .87 for Extraversion, .82 for Agreeableness, .79 for Conscientiousness, .86 for Emotional Stability and .84 for Intellect/Imagination. Those are solid figures for scales this short.
Reliability is not the same as validity. A scale can measure something consistently and still not measure what the label claims. What the Big Five has going for it is decades of external evidence: conscientiousness predicts job performance and academic results, neuroticism predicts mental-health outcomes, and the structure replicates in languages that had no part in building it.
What this particular administration cannot offer is norms. Your score is a position inside the 10-50 range of each scale, not a percentile against a comparison group, because we have no normed sample to compare you with and will not invent one.
Worth taking if
Not the right tool for
Scores are a position within the scale, not a ranking against other people. Without a normed sample we won't pretend to give you a percentile.
Self-report measures how you see yourself today. Mood, recent events and how you want to come across all move the numbers.
The Big Five describes tendencies, not limits. A low conscientiousness score does not mean you cannot be organised.
This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.
50 questions, about 10 minutes. Your answers are scored on this device and stored on this device. There is no account to create and nothing is sent to a server. Progress saves as you go, so a long assessment can be finished across more than one sitting.
No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from Big-Five Factor Markers, 50 items, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.
No. Those sort people into types; the Big Five reports five continuous dimensions, which is what the research supports. Most people sit near the middle of most traits, and a type system has to round that away. The IPIP items here are also public domain, which the MBTI items are not.
About ten minutes for 50 items. Answer quickly, because the first reaction is usually more accurate than a considered one, and the scales were validated on people answering at a normal pace.
It is free and there is no account. Your answers are scored in your browser and stored there; nothing is sent to a server.
Extraversion is how much social contact and stimulation you seek. Agreeableness is how cooperative or sceptical your default stance is. Conscientiousness is how much you plan and follow through. Neuroticism is how strongly and how long you feel negative emotion. Openness is your appetite for ideas and novelty. Each one is explained in full further down this page.
A percentile requires a norm group: a large sample of people like you, measured with the same instrument. We do not have one, so reporting a percentile would mean making it up. The raw score and its position in the 10-50 range are real; a percentile would not be.
Yes, slowly. Trait scores drift across adult life, mostly toward higher conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism. Over weeks, though, most movement is measurement noise rather than change in you.
This 50-item version is the sensible default. Take the Mini-IPIP if you only have three minutes, and the 120-item IPIP-NEO if you want each domain broken into six facets, which is the one that shows which half of a mid-range score is doing the work.
Item text and keying taken from ipip.ori.org; the Emotional Stability scale is reported here as Neuroticism, with every item in that scale flipped. Check the source.