Testing 1-2-3

The clerical/administrative tests went surprisingly well. Apparently, the world has extemely low standards, which I consistently meet. Woo!

My test scores were quite high in knowledge of Word (92%), Outlook (96%) , Excel (87%) and Powerpoint (82%). There were at least 3 questions that I found the answers for while answering other questions, but you can't go back on the test. Though my interviewer was very happy, I honestly don't consider this exceptional . Shouldn't that be a minimum for someone who makes a living as an admin? My WPM in typing was so abysmal that I'm not even going to admit what it was, except to say that it was under 40. Yeah, that bad. On the plus side, my accuracy was 97%. My accuracy in data entry was 100% for both alphanumeric and straight numeric, but my speed was slightly below average on the first and only slightly above average on the second. Luckily accuracy trumps speed.

But the fun part was language skills and math. Having majored in Linguistics, I am always interested to know what questions will be asked. I expect a certain amount of "their/they're/there", for example. There was an "it's/its" questions and one where the answer was "him and me", which made me think for a moment. Then there were the basic math word problems and some "find the next two numbers in the following sequence". Those were calming.

Then there was a personality test. One segment asked me to rate on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) how much I felt the given words applied to me. I was going to give a neutral score to "precise". But then I thought, well, I am precise sometimes, when the situation calls for it. Sometimes you can let things slide. I wonder what they mean by "precise", exactly. So since I was trying to precisely determine what the test meant by "precise" in order to answer the question as accurately as possible, I marked myself at 5.