Short Employment Tests

The Short Employment Tests - SET - are a group of 3 individual 5 minute tests for applicants seeking clerical positions, and is in the category of pre employment tests. The SET is "not intended for use with candidates for administrative positions, nor with maintenance employees or factory production workers."

The battery consists of a Verbal (V) test of vocabulary and word knowledge, a 50 item test of general vocabulary; a Numerical (N) test of simple mathematical computations, a 90 item test of the four arithmetic operations; and a Clerical Aptitude (CA) test involving locating a name in a list and classifying a dollar amount next to that name. The tests are short and quickly administered and scored.

The SET manual does not include reliability data on total scores, although subsequent reviewers have established these to be quite high.

The overall trend in the validity studies is that the total validity coefficients (combining all three tests) are higher than individual test validities. This emphasizes the importance of administering all three tests as opposed to administering only one or two of them. The highest correlations with similar sections of other tests are in the CA test, where all of the correlations are significant at the 0.01 level.

Normative data in the 1978 supplement to the original manual are frequently presented in applicant tables involving both sexes. This may result in test administrator confusion when referring to normative data.

The The Short Employment Tests appears to be a usable pre employment test for the specific area of clerical applicants and is designed to test applicants seeking clerical positions. There is no age requirement for the test and the test is usually administered in 15 minutes.