 Since we have been talking about assessment and its related procedures, this is very much important to understand that in certain circumstances, all the kind of assessment we are interested in is not available. In those scenarios where the assessment procedures, the assessment tools and relevant questionnaires are not available, we have to construct them. And while doing the test construction, it is not that easy that we are going to just develop a test on the basis of certain interviews, on the basis of certain indicators available to us through previous literature or things like that. But we have to follow a certain protocol in process of test construction. Psychologists who develop tests and other assessment techniques use appropriate psychometric procedures and current scientific and professional knowledge for test designing, standardization, validation, reduction and elimination of personal biases, and recommendation for use. So test construction is a specialized field of psychology in which there are certain rules and regulations that we have to follow to construct tests. Simply, we cannot create a question area, a tool or a survey by collecting some of the clients' batons. Rather, we have to validate them. We have to see its content validity index. We have to see its face validity. We have to see that either this test is going to pass the factor analysis, the confirmatory factor analysis, the exploratory factor analysis and then we will do its reliability analysis. We will see which items we have to delete, which items we have to retain, how we are going to develop a complete comprehensive test, its sub-scales, and that is a complete statistical psychological assessment, after which we make a valid tool and compare it with other already developed tools to establish its convergent validity, then we have to see its discriminant validity and concurrent validity and things like that. So by saying that I want to explain that test construction is not a simple thing. It is a specialized and very much trained field in which we have to do different logistics to develop a test, but yet psychologists have to do that because at time they are constrained with the assessment techniques and they have to opt the option of test construction. Interpreting the Assessment Results When interpreting assessment results, psychologists take into account purpose of assessment as well as the various test factors and the other characteristics of the person being assessed, so they are not only the score which they are going to look into, but all the factors which are associated with it, either at that time the mood of the subject, or associated factors like noise, lighting, health, personal preference factors, biases, certain stress results can be accurate or inaccurate or invalid, so we have to see all those factors as well and as much as a psychologist can control those factors, it is very much important to control them so that they cannot be our confounding variables. Then all those characteristics that might be affecting the person being assessed that might affect psychologist's judgment and reduce the accuracy of their interpretation. If we will be unable to accurately measure all those confounding variables and we don't make them as control variables, they are certainly going to affect the test interpretations. Assessment by unqualified persons is another important thing to be talked about. Psychological assessment techniques by unqualified persons are not promoted. Overall psychology is not being promoted by you know if they are being practiced by unqualified and non-professional persons, but specifically with reference to test administration, if this is going to be done by anyone who is unqualified, this is going to be highly unethical, except for training purposes with appropriate supervision. Then another thing is that we are not going to use the obsolete test. Assessment and intervention decisions cannot be based on the tests that are outdated for the current purpose. As I mentioned earlier, that tests are revised with time and those test versions which are for a specific time period and after time they need to be revised, so we have to see that we are not using that test assessment in the current time which should be used in the scenarios 10 years ago. Let's say we take the example of intelligence again. The construction of intelligence will be differently measured in today's age as compared to it has been measured 20 years ago because of that global change we are living in. So we need to see which version we are using. Similarly, for different personality assessments, with the change in DSM, different versions of DSM are coming, 4 or 4 TR and currently we are at DSM 5. So the classifications of disorders are also changing. So accordingly we need to see that either the test we are using is of revised version or it is not made according to the old classification or cluster. So it is very important to see this technically. Then test scoring and interpretation is another important thing. Psychologists who offer assessment or scoring services to other professionals accurately describe norms, validity, reliability and applications to the procedures. If we don't fully follow the scoring process, in its interpretation, if we have to transform raw scores, if we have to recoding or recoding it, if we have to reverse coat it and if we have to classify it, we didn't do it. We didn't properly deal with its sub-scales. So maybe after the original scores are transformed, we can't give a true meaning. So expertise in this domain is very much important. If the scoring is fully followed, like there is a test, TIPI, it has 10 items, it makes 5 sub-scales and after adding every 2 items, a personality domain is reflected. Some of them have to be reverse-coded, some of them don't. Who should be totaled? This needs to be understood very carefully by the student of psychology who is doing any such kind of assessment to get proper and appropriate results. Scoring and interpretation services should be used on the basis of evidence of its validity and other appropriate consideration. Whatever scoring manual is provided to you, it is very important to fully follow it. We can't interpret it on our own. If any scoring has to be done on any software, if any quality of life scale is to be scored on RAND, then you should score it on RAND. You just can't score them manually. If the provision is not being given to you, then it is not in your preview that we should assess it ourselves. Similarly, whatever domains are given for assessment, we need to fully follow them while scoring any of the questionnaire. Explaining the assessment result is also very important. Colleges take reasonable steps to ensure that the explanation of results are given to the individual or designated representative unless nature of the relationship precludes provision of an explanation of research. For example, in some security screening, you may not describe the results. In any organization consulting, we may not be able to discuss the previous things and for forensic valuation. So there are certain cases where we are not giving accurate information to the participant but we need to give that law enforcing agency. Similarly, if we get a clue during the assessment that we need to inform the police department, then we are going to inform that to the police department rather than to the subject who has been consulted us about that. Let's say that an individual comes for his journal assessment and his psychopath tendencies are very high-show. So we need to be very vigilant rather than telling them directly to the client, we have to tell them to the state-protected agencies. Then maintaining the test security is very, very important. Psychologists make reasonable efforts to maintain the integrity and security of test materials like the manuals, the instruments, the protocols and test questions and other assessment techniques consistent with law and contractual obligations and in a manner that permits adherence to the ethical code. You can't open your test construction by giving the manual to each individual to assess your scale score and publicly use it on the profit. We have seen that all the kind of psychological tests are always being copyrighted and they are being taken into very much secrecy and we have to access the manuals while sitting in the lab. We just can't photocopy them. We just can't take them out of the lab and we can't openly sit and assess them because we are being ethically restricted to use them into a closed setting and into a supervised environment. So this is something which is very much important related to not only test construction but about the test maintenance, its interpretation of scores and moreover its test security.