Testing Engineering Students: Are We Really Fair?

Since its publication by the Educational Testing Service in 1962, the MBTI (Myers-Briggs-Type Indicator) has seen application in a variety of settings. Its usefulness to the classroom teacher, however, is unclear at this time. This investigation addressed the relationship of two dimensions of that instrument, Sensing-Intuiting (S-N) and Judging-Perceiving (J-P), to performance on tests containing both computational problems and multiple choice questions. The objective of the investigation was to determine whether particular types of testing offer an advantage to certain individuals due to their preferred ways of internalizing and processing information. Tests in a sophomore-level strength of materials course were constructed to contain several computational problems and 10 multiple choice questions each. Questions were designed to operate at one of three levels of the problem-solving taxonomy: diagnosis, routines or interpretation. The performances of both S-N students and J-P students were compared on both problems and multiple choice questions within each test and on the departmental final examination. No differences due to the J-P dimension were detected. The S-N dimension, however, yielded several significant differences. N-type students performed substantially better on multiple choice questions on two of the three examinations given and better on computational problems on one of the three examinations. As expected, they excelled on those questions which tested at the ``interpretation'' level. No differences were seen on questions requiring diagnosis or routines. In all cases, even when differences did not achieve significance, there was a trend favoring the N-type student.