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IPIP-NEO Personality Test (120 items, 30 facets)

Thirty facets across the five domains. The detailed version, about twenty minutes.

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120 questions across 5 scales, about 20 minutes|Published scoring key from IPIP-NEO-120, not invented

Authors: Johnson, J. A. (2014), Journal of Research in Personality; items from the International Personality Item Pool

Licence: Public domain IPIP items, free to use without permission

What the IPIP-NEO-120 measures

Extraversion

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.

6 facets

  • Friendliness
  • Gregariousness
  • Assertiveness
  • Activity Level
  • Excitement-Seeking
  • Cheerfulness

Agreeableness

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.

6 facets

  • Trust
  • Morality
  • Altruism
  • Cooperation
  • Modesty
  • Sympathy

Conscientiousness

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.

6 facets

  • Self-Efficacy
  • Orderliness
  • Dutifulness
  • Achievement-Striving
  • Self-Discipline
  • Cautiousness

Neuroticism

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.

6 facets

  • Anxiety
  • Anger
  • Depression
  • Self-Consciousness
  • Immoderation
  • Vulnerability

Openness to experience

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.

6 facets

  • Imagination
  • Artistic Interests
  • Emotionality
  • Adventurousness
  • Intellect
  • Liberalism

What answering the IPIP-NEO-120 looks like

Question 1 of 120

How accurately does this describe you?

Worry about things.

  • 1Very inaccurate
  • 2Moderately inaccurate
  • 3Neither accurate nor inaccurate
  • 4Moderately accurate
  • 5Very accurate
One item at a time, keyboard or mouse. Every one of the 120 items is worded this way, and your place is saved as you go.

What the IPIP-NEO-120 is

Broad traits hide structure. Two people can land at exactly the same point on Conscientiousness, one because they are meticulously tidy and hopeless at finishing things, the other because they live in chaos and never miss a deadline. A domain score averages that away. Facets are how you get it back.

The facet structure comes from the NEO PI-R, a commercial inventory that measures six facets per domain. Goldberg's IPIP project produced public-domain scales matching all thirty, and in 2014 John Johnson selected the best four items for each facet from the 300-item IPIP-NEO, producing the 120-item form used here.

Johnson's paper reports that the shortened version retains the factor structure of the full inventory well enough for applied use. The trade is explicit: thirty measurements instead of five, each one based on four items.

How the IPIP-NEO-120 is scored

  1. 120 answers

    Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.

  2. 5 scales

    Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.

  3. A band

    Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.

Each domain is measured by 24 items (six facets x four items) on a five-point accuracy scale, with reverse-keyed items flipped before summing. Domain raw scores run from 24 to 120 and facet scores from 4 to 20; bars show the position inside those ranges, not a percentile.

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.

How accurate the IPIP-NEO-120 is

Four items per facet is a short scale by any standard, and the facet scores should be read as a pattern across a domain rather than as thirty precise numbers. A single facet sitting two points away from its neighbours means nothing; three facets clustering at one end of a domain means something.

The domain scores are a different matter. Each is built from 24 items, which is more than the 50-item form gives any single trait, so the five headline numbers here are the most stable ones on this site.

Johnson (2014) reports the development and psychometrics of this form in the Journal of Research in Personality; the underlying facet scales and their published alphas are listed on ipip.ori.org.

Who the IPIP-NEO-120 is for

Worth taking if

  • Anyone whose Big Five result came back mid-range and unhelpful
  • Understanding which part of a trait is driving your behaviour
  • People who have taken a broad personality test and want the detail under it

Not the right tool for

  • A quick answer, because this one takes about twenty minutes
  • Reading each facet as a precise measurement
  • Selection, hiring or clinical decisions

What the IPIP-NEO-120 cannot tell you

Four items per facet means each facet is measured imprecisely. Differences of a few points between facets are noise.

Scores are positions within the scale, not percentiles against a norm group.

Facet names come from the Five-Factor tradition and are technical terms. 'Immoderation' and 'Liberalism' in particular do not mean what they mean in ordinary English.

This is a long self-report. Fatigue and response sets affect the back half more than the front.

This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.

Take the IPIP-NEO-120 now

120 questions, about 20 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.

Start IPIP-NEO-120

No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from IPIP-NEO-120, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.

IPIP-NEO-120: frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a domain and a facet?

A domain is one of the five broad traits. A facet is one of six narrower components inside it. Conscientiousness, for example, splits into self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline and cautiousness, all of which can diverge.

How long does the IPIP-NEO-120 take?

About twenty minutes. Progress saves automatically, so you can stop partway and finish later on the same device.

Is this the same as the NEO PI-R?

No, and it deliberately avoids being. It measures the same thirty facet constructs using public-domain IPIP items rather than the copyrighted NEO PI-R items.

Why do some facets have odd names?

They are technical terms from the Five-Factor tradition. Immoderation means difficulty resisting urges, not excess in general, and Liberalism means readiness to question tradition and authority, not a political position.

Is it free?

Yes, with no account. The items are public domain and the scoring is done in your browser.

Should I take this or the 50-item Big Five?

Start with the 50-item version if you have never done one. Come here when a domain score sat near the middle and you want to know why.

Is the IPIP-NEO scientifically valid?

The IPIP scales were built to measure the same constructs as established commercial inventories without using their items, and Johnson (2014) reports the development and psychometrics of this 120-item form in the Journal of Research in Personality. The underlying facet scales and their published alpha coefficients are listed on ipip.ori.org. What that supports is applied and research use, not any claim that a twenty-minute questionnaire can diagnose anything.

Where these questions come from

All 120 items and their + / - keying were read from a published IPIP-NEO-120 administration form; facet membership follows the form's fixed rotation and was checked to give exactly four items for each of the thirty facets. Check the source.

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