PSY 860: Personality Assessment

This course will cover topics in personality/psychological assessment in the fields of psychology/counseling. This is a vast topic, and will take a lot of hard work on your part to complete this course successfully. There is a wealth of information to absorb. The most important goal you should have for this course is acquiring an understanding of how clients can be assessed and becoming confident about applying concepts to real life counseling/clinical situations. Please note that this course cannot be a substitute for actually working with the tests we will study with mock clients. It is essential that you practice administering and scoring any psychological test before you use it with a real client. However, through the course, you should gain a solid understanding of major objective, IQ and projective tests, their usefulness and their limitations. Becoming familiar with this material will also allow you to better understand psychological reports (for instance in your clients’ records).

Unlike other topics, psychological testing cannot just be learned in theory. For this reason, the online forum presents some serious limitations for approaching the subject matter.

Textbook:Handbook of Psychological Assessment 4th Edition (2003), by Gary Groth-Marnat, published by Wiley & Sons, ISBN: 0-471-41979-6