Personality Tests Published Online

Last year, as part of Wikipedia's entry on the Rorschach Inkblot test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test), Dr. James Heilman, an emergency-room physician in Canada, posted all ten inkblots along with the most common responses to each. A controversy erupted from the posting. Many felt, not only were copyright laws violated, the integrity and validity of the test had been compromised. During the uproar, Dr Heilman was investigated for unprofessional behavior by his local medical association.

If you go to https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1109032158 you will find a posting for a discussion group on Antipolygraph.com in which the person listed the first 75 questions of the MMPI-2. Here, too, questions of ethics and copyrights can be raised.

While I am not advocating the use of these items in your classroom, that is a question for each teacher to individually answer, I am suggesting both postings can make for a very interesting class discussion on testing, copyrights, ethics, keeping things confidential in the internet age, etc.