Should You Care?
I’m not a huge fan of creativity tests. If you’re going to take one for the giggle value I’ll go along with you but for the most part even if you take one for fun and it tells you you don’t have a creative cell in your body, chances are you’ll take it to heart.
Usually that means whatever creative endeavour you planned will come to a grinding halt. That would likely be one of the worst tragedies ever to happen to you.
Creativity is more than doing something deemed worthy of a craft, becoming famous or getting ridiculously rich selling paintings to folks who haven’t a clue what you were trying to convey when you painted it. Creativity is a spark of life inside you and no one can tell you how great it is, or isn’t, especially using creativity tests.
Testing Creativity Tests
I took four creativity tests, I won’t mention which ones only that they were supposed to be serious. I took a few fun ones too, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with those as they were blatantly meant to poke fun at their more serious counterparts.
The first one was a word association test. None of the words were related to anything creative but I suppose you needed some creativity to guess the word that was related to each set.
I scored badly 4/15 definitely not creativity material. As I read my score the test went on to explain that the same creativity test was given to scientists and engineers and was found to be extremely helpful, it didn’t say for what. I’m not much interested in becoming a scientist or an engineer so I wasnt too disappointed.
The second in the series of creativity tests had you looking at pictures and you had to say which ones appealed to you. This time I scored 7/8, I was deemed highly creative. (And I would like to add that the picture I didn’t like was a terrible picture and didn’t stir any creativity in me whatsoever so I think I deserved 8/8.)
The third in my conglomeration of creativity tests was one in which you chose which personality traits best described you. At the start I got 10/22, I guess if I tried hard enough I could be creative. Then it analyzed the second part of the test and agreed that some creative people included these traits in their list and experts agreed they were relevant. My score bounced to 16/22. I was considered creative, perhaps a bit eccentric, but creative none the less.
The next was a set of questions with an a or b choice. The questions were random, do you like to dine out? do you think red is a good color? I scored 11/20. It said I failed. I’ve always had the half full attitude and figured since I scored a tic over half I could be creative if I wanted to be.
My Final Score!
Out of four creativity tests two said I was creative and two said I wasn’t. My personal opinion is that of all of them maybe the one concerning which picture I liked was the most relevant to creativity, (and I scored almost perfect so I liked that one).
My Real Opinion on Creativity Tests?
Not once did any of them ask me if I liked creative things, if I was drawn to doing something creative, if I got any satisfaction from something I had created or if I enjoyed the creative process. I would think those questions would be somewhere at the top of any list in creativity tests.
Frankly, I wasn’t impressed and have no intentions of changing anything because of them.
My Sure Fire Creativity Test
- Do you enjoy the creative process?
- Are you drawn to doing something creative?
- Do you get satisfaction from something you have created?
If you answered yes to any of these questions you passed and are a creative person.
There are a lot of different types of creativity tests out there, I certainly didn’t do them all. I purposely targeted those that tried to determine if you were a creative person, those are the ones I don’t care for. I believe if you want to be creative you should find what brings you joy and do it. Take a creativity test if you want to but don’t stop being creative because some test tells you you scored too low.