The psychology test was administered by the army. When I turned up to the Defence Forces building in Pitt St I told the security guard at the entrace that I had an appointment, and even though I didn't know the name of the psychologist I was supposed to see he gave me a pass and let me in without checking any ID. As a matter of fact, not once during my medical or psych testing process, including the entire day I spent yesterday walking around in the bowels of Defence Plaza, have I ever been asked to prove who I am.

The building was full of people wearing tight, high-waisted khaki pants and disturbingly shiny boots. I was escorted to Level 17 where the psychology uniform included weird ropey-things winding around the sleeves and a gold badge formed from the letters PSYCH attached to the shoulders like strange army bling. My army-supply satchel covered with zine pins and travel patches suddenly seemed a little faux.

I sat down in a waiting area and eyed off the rack of Defence Forces magazines with cover pictures of tanks, neon radar screens and camouflage gear, and took down an issue with "Defence Civilian's Account: Life in Iraq" on the cover. I flipped it open and it landed on a full-page article on how to make a really good souffle. Souffle? Shouldn't this stuff be highly classified or something? If I was in charge of maintaining a defence force that would strike fear into the hearts of an invading enemy, I wouldn't leave in-house souffle recipes lying around so any girl could find it and write it up in a weblog for all to see. Not without checking her ID, anyway.

I was in the waiting room with one other guy, a Navy guy. Where were all the other Antarctica people? I'd kind of expected that this would be my first chance to meet some of the other people who were heading down south, but it turned out that the appointments are all spread out over several weeks. The Navy guy and I were handed clipboards with two forms to fill out: one asked me for my personal details, hobbies and employment history as well as my service number, rank, corps, unit and/or ship. I was tempted to write the Aurora Australis, which has guns on it now to deter illegal fishing boats, but they seemed pretty humourless so I left those fields blank. The other form was a page full of yes/no questions like, "Do you ever have the feeling that you are not like other people?" and "Can you stand as much pain as others can?" and "Do you feel like jumping off when you are on a high place?" In other words, some of the questions were ambiguous, some were strange, and the rest had obvious implications. This was a theme for the next three hours of multiple choice tests.

After filling that one out I was given two other multiple choice tests, which took up the next three hours. They were called the CAQ test and the 16 PF test, both from a group based in Illinois. If you're a psychologist who knows anything about these, write me an email! The first test had somewhere between 200 and 300 questions and the last one had about 200. The first half of the first test tiptoed around a bit - there were questions like "I would like to be a lion-tamer in a circus: yes/no/maybe" as well as incredibly poorly phrased ones like, "For reading, I enjoy, (a) true-to-life stories of military battles, (b) light, imaginative things, (c) uncertain". No middle ground? Perhaps not for the army in Illinois. How about this one, which also came up: "I admire the beauty of a poem more than that of a well-made gun. (a) yes, (b) no, (c) uncertain." It's probably supposed to judge whether you are more practical or more aesthetic in your judgement of things, but instead it just reflects whether you're a pacifist. And what do you make of a question like, "People who don't have enough 'guts' to look after themselves should be looked after, for free, by others: yes/no?"

The second half changed dramatically. The yes/no questions became things like: "I've sometimes actually felt that someone may be trying to poison me." "I think about death, which ends all our problems." "I sometimes think I am a doomed or condemned person." "In dark corners I often think I see people watching me, but when I look carefully they don't appear." The point is: it's clear that a 'yes' answer to any of these will set off a big klaxon in the psychologist's office. So the first thing you do when working out what answer to write for these questions, like any question in the test, is decide what they're trying to get at, and answer according to that and not your gut reaction. I don't mean that I actually do see shadowy figures trying to poison me, but that these questions would only detect a stupid person, not a crazy one. A better example is the question: "I would prefer to be a teacher than a forester: yes/no." Let's say that my abhorrence of deforestation would outweigh my abhorrence of smartarse schoolkids. Then it would seem logical to answer the question 'yes'. However, if I try to think like a psychologist, I imagine that the question is trying to see whether I prefer a social job above an independent, isolated job, which is probably not the case. So the answer I would actually write is 'no'. In other words, answering the question truthfully would give them a false impression of what I'm like. Conclusion: psychology testing is dodgey.

Corollary: about a quarter of the questions in the second test had already come up in the first test. I noticed that I was answering a lot of them differently the second time around. One of my friends pointed out that this could be a sneaky psychologist's trick to see how decisive I am. I still think it's just evidence that personality profiling is a witchdoctor's art.

After a break between 12 and 1:30, I had an appointment (finally) with an actual person. By that time my test scores had all been tallied up and plotted out on a chart of opposing character traits. The psychologist told me that the shaded area down the middle was normal. None of my points were in the shaded area. She told me that not many people had all their points in the shaded area so I shouldn't worry. I wasn't worried. The points spiked out at 'self-confident', 'independant' and 'imaginative'. The psychologist said they were all good traits to have in Antarctica. She asked if I had any questions about the test. I asked her whether the questions which came up occasionally that were like, "mother is to child as cat is to...", were just to test if you were actually paying attention or just filling in the boxes randomly. She said yes, but they were also to test to see if you were really psychotic and saw things that just totally weren't there. Huh? Was that true or some kind of psychologists' joke? I also asked whether the teacher/forester question was testing and she said it was to see whether you'd prefer a social or an isolated job. There you go.

The interview was actually the most interesting and sensible bit of the day. The psychologist was really friendly and open, and just asked me questions to find out whether I'd ever spent any time in a small community or an isolated environment, and whether I really knew what I was getting myself in for. She wanted to make sure I knew I'd be expected to help out with chores around the base, and that there wouldn't be many other 25-year-old girls down there, and that I'd had a chat with my family and friends to make sure they were going to be OK with me being down there. I told her that I'd travelled all around and that I'd worked two summers in Tasmania as a crane driver and that my family knew they could phone me and so on. So she said she'd file all that in the report that she was sending to the AAD, and that was it.

It was after 3 pm when I finished up. The woman who took me through the multiple choice tests escorted me to the front of the building and I had a chat with her on the pavement while she had a cigarette. She told me that she wasn't meant to be seen smoking in uniform in public but that the basement had a gas leak so they couldn't go down there to smoke anymore. She told me that the worst part of standing outside was that people occasionally came up and abused her just because she was in an army uniform. Little do the public know that underneath, the defence forces are just people who like a fag and a good souffle.

~~~~~

Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics, had an army psychology test which he found dodgey too. He, however, didn't play the game like I did. Read the very funny account of it here. (Extracted from his autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!")