Five factors, thirty facets
The Big Five is the only personality model with a real research base behind it — it's what actually shows up when you factor-analyze how people describe themselves, across languages and across decades. This runs the public-domain IPIP-NEO item pool in three lengths and scores it against published norms for your age and sex. Nothing you answer leaves your browser.
A raw score means nothing on its own — percentiles come from comparing you to a reference group, and personality scores differ by age and sex. Both are optional; leave them alone and you'll be scored against everyone.
Used only to pick a norm table in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and you can change it on the results page.
Openness to Experience — imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, appetite for novel ideas and unfamiliar experience. High scorers are curious and unconventional; low scorers are practical, concrete and traditional.
Conscientiousness — planning, persistence, self-discipline and impulse control. It's the trait that best predicts job performance and academic outcomes across almost every kind of work.
Extraversion — the pull toward people, activity and stimulation, and the tendency to feel positive emotion. It's about where your energy goes, not how much you like people.
Agreeableness — trust, cooperation, and how much weight you put on other people's interests next to your own. High scorers are warm and accommodating; low scorers are skeptical, blunt and competitive.
Neuroticism — the tendency to experience negative emotion: anxiety, anger, low mood, and sensitivity to stress. Its opposite pole is usually called emotional stability.
Each of the five splits into six narrower facets — thirty in all — and two people with the same domain score can look completely different once you read the facets underneath it.
Answers save on this device as you go, so you can close the tab and come back.
The items. Every statement here comes from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain bank of personality items maintained by the Oregon Research Institute. The 300-item form is Goldberg's IPIP-NEO-300, built as a public-domain analogue of Costa & McCrae's NEO PI-R and covering the same five domains and thirty facets. The 120-item form is John A. Johnson's IPIP-NEO-120, a shortened version validated on a sample of over 300,000 people. The 30-item form on this page is not a published instrument: it takes one item from each of the thirty facets in the 120, chosen so that half the items are reverse-worded, and estimates each facet from that single item. Treat its numbers as a sketch.
The scoring. Items are answered 1–5, reverse-keyed items are flipped (6 minus your answer), facet scores are the sum of their items, and domain scores are the sum of their six facets. Those raw sums are converted to T-scores — mean 50, standard deviation 10 — against Johnson's published norm tables, which are broken out by sex and age band. Percentiles come from the normal distribution of those T-scores. The 30-item form is scaled onto the 120-item metric (each facet's single item stands in for its four-item facet score) before the same norms are applied, which is why its percentiles are labelled as estimates.
The error bars. No questionnaire measures anything exactly. The grey band on each meter is a 68% confidence interval — roughly one standard error of measurement — computed from the reliability of each form: about α = .92 per domain for the 300-item version, about .85 for the 120, and the Spearman–Brown projection of that down to a quarter of the length (about .59) for the 30. If two people's bands overlap, the difference between them isn't worth talking about.
What it can't do. Self-report can be gamed, deliberately or not; a bad week can move Neuroticism; and norms drawn largely from English-speaking internet volunteers are not a perfect stand-in for humanity. The Big Five is descriptive, not explanatory — it tells you where you sit relative to other people, not why, and it is not a type system. There are no categories here, no letters, and no "you are an X" — those belong to instruments with much weaker evidence behind them.
Privacy. Everything runs in your browser. Answers are kept in this device's local storage so you can close the tab mid-test, and they're only ever transmitted if you choose to copy a share link and send it to someone yourself.