The purpose of the present study was to examine the fakability of the situational judgment test. Specifically, the study was focused on the following questions; (1) whether participants are able to fake their answers on the situational judgment test in the real situation of selection, (2) whether faking influences the criterion-related validity of the situational judgment test and its incremental validity over cognitive and personality tests, and (3) whether the combination of different scoring key(SME consensus, average in response, and empirical keying) and different scoring algorithm(scenario, Best-Worst, and Pick most) has influence on the degree of fakability as well as both criterion-related validity and incremental validity of the situational judgment test. 110 students who applied to the leadership program were considered the faking group, while 129 students of B department at A university were considered the honest group. The members of both groups completed a cognitive test, a personality questionnaire and a situational judgment test. Only for the situational judgment tests, each group was asked to respond as instructed. Another group of 78 students of A university participated in the survey to develop two scoring key(empirical, average in response keying). SME consensus key was developed by 9 SMEs(5 undergraduate students with leadership and good GPA, 4 graduate students). And then 9 situational judgment scores were produced independently. Results indicated that the all scores of students in the faking group were significantly higher than those of students in the honest group. Furthermore, criterion-related validity of the situational judgement test in the honest group was higher than that of the faking group for both task performance and contextual performance. While faking had negative effects on the criterion-related validity for both criteria of performance, incremental validity of the situational judgement test in the honest group was higher than that of the faking group only for the contextual criteria. Finally, the limitation and future direction of the present study were discussed.
Influence of response instructions and response format on applicant perceptions of a situational judgement test for medical school selection