IPIP-NEO-300 — an interpretation engine

Three hundred items, about forty minutes, and at the end one report written from your answers alone — every claim in it traceable to the number that produced it and the paper behind it. It is a long questionnaire and an unusually careful reading of it. If you are going to spend the time, this is what you get for it.

Around half your thirty scores will land in the shaded part or just outside it, and the report says so plainly rather than talking them up. A score far from the middle is the easiest thing to notice — but often the most interesting sentence comes from two ordinary scores that do not normally sit together.

What it costs you

Time, mostly. Three hundred items is the price of thirty scales instead of five, and the thirty are where the detail lives — “agreeable” covers both warmth and cooperation, and a person can sit high on one and low on the other. Collapse that to one number and you lose the only part worth reading. Most people finish in 35 to 50 minutes, and you can stop and come back whenever you like.

What it does with your data

Nothing is stored. Your answers and your report live in the part of the web address after the #, which browsers never send to a server — it does not appear in access logs, referrer headers, or caches.

That is not the same as nothing being transmitted, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. To produce the report, your answers and everything computed from them are sent once to a language model. Here is the whole of it:

Step	What the server sees	What it keeps
Signing in	Your username	One key recording you have used your single run
Analysis	Answers and age/sex, in memory for one request	Nothing
Writing	All 300 answers, every score, your age and sex, whether you are in the US, whether English is your first language, and anything you wrote in the optional box, sent to the model	Subject to the model provider’s terms
Delivery	The report, returned to you	Nothing
Your link	Nothing. Your run and your report live after the `#`, encrypted with a key derived from your passphrase in your own browser — so a link is unreadable to anyone who has it and no one else, this site included, can open it	Nothing

The model gets all of it because a report written from a summary of you is a report that has to guess. It gets it once, for one request, and this service keeps none of it.

So if you lose the link, the report is gone, and it cannot be written again. You will be able to download it as a file, and you should.

What it will not do

It will not give you a type, a colour, or a four-letter code — the evidence says personality is a smooth space, not a set of boxes. It will not diagnose you, and it is not a screening instrument. It will not tell you what job to take or who to marry.

It also will not flatter you, which is a deliberate choice rather than a stern one. Anything vague enough to feel true about everybody is exactly what a report like this has to avoid, so where the research runs out it says so and stops.

Begin

Read how it works, which research it uses, or why it asks your age and sex first.