As a college student, I signed up for Psychology.

One day, we arrived to find tests at each space. We did not have assigned seats. It was a big class.

Our teacher told us that these tests would give us the experience of taking some of the tests we had been discussing in class. Fine. One was an IQ test. One I don’t remember. The last was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, known as the MMPI. The MMPI has been updated several times since it was first developed.

Here is what wikipedia says about the MMPI.

“The original clinical scales were designed to measure common diagnoses of the era. While the descriptions of each type were originally used in assessment, the current practice is to use the numbers only.

“Codetypes are a combination of the one or two highest-scoring clinical scales (ex. – 8, 48). Codetypes and interaction of clinical scales can be quite complex and require specialized training to properly interpret.”

We were laughing at such MMPI questions (true/false) such as, “Someone is trying to poison my food.” The food at our school was a big joke so some answered yes for the fun of it. Another test item asked whether the test-taker had the feeling someone was “always” following him or her.

Well, somebody was following us all this one time.

In about six weeks, I was talking on the phone to my mother. “Oh, by the way, we got your test scores.”

What test scores?

“They came from the psychology department. You did well. Nothing to worry about. There was one funny thing. On the MMPI (my mother knew her tests) the report said that the ’subject tested higher in paranoia but teenagers tend to test higher in that category.’ ”

In fact, when our professor discussed the class results as a whole, he laughed about this one. That was before we knew a little paranoia would have been an appropriate response to his lab sections.

Paranoia, as you can see above, is defined as “level of trust, suspiciousness and sensitivity.” (Teenagers and adults have been on opposing sides since the ancient Greeks. Trust or the lack of it, suspiciousness and sensitivity are big adolescent issues as they separate from their parents. So, we all got a free ride on that measure.)

We never figured out how they did it. No assigned seats. It was the lab section of the class—it wasn’t huge but it wasn’t small, either. We were not asked to sign our names. When done, we passed them in from left to right. A grad assistant was watching these papers as they were passed along the line, but it would have been possible for someone to drop them or, without knowing it, put hers in out of order without meaning to.

Despite the risks in matching right student to wrong paper, six weeks later, and without our knowledge, our parents had test results.

It was not the testing that made me mad (see Paranoia above). It was that they didn’t tell us they were testing us. It would have been fine if they had. It would have been fine if they said they were sending the tests to our parents. This was back when universities believed that the people who wrote the tuition checks were entitled to see your grades and any other information they chose to share with those people, our parents. None of us would have thought that unreasonable.

A little while after I talked to my mother, a classmate came in to my room, furious. “My mother says she just got test results from Psych. Can you believe it?”

And so it went. One by one. All of us had been tested. All of us had heard from our parents, who mainly were happy that their daughters had been proven to be smart or, at least, smart enough.

Those in charge, who have tests, can do what they damned well please with them if they are not regulated and, alas, often even if they are. They can require people to take a test to get into college, get a job, get married or get diagnosed. Tests have many purposes, legitimate ones. We are used to them.

Tests are powerful in that people believe in their accuracy, whether they should or not. (The public also has no idea how to decide whether a test is accurate or not. How could we?)

Tests are powerful in that they can be used to evaluate people by those who hold the results, with or without the subject’s knowledge.

Now there is another college “teaching” students with tests—University of California at Berkeley. The item below explains that the incoming freshmen will be tested but only for three things—their responses to dairy products, alcohol and folic acid. The university thinks this will be an “interesting” way to learn about this, says the story.

How do these freshmen know that they are to be tested only on three things? How could they stop anyone from doing more than three tests? How do they know where the results will be kept? How do they know who else may see these? How do they know what the university will do with these over time? They don’t. That’s the point.

My college lab experiment was irritating but not life-changing. That lab’s “interesting” experience just offers a simple look into tests and what can be done with them. The MMPI, although it always has its detractors, is a test which has been around for decades and is purchased from the University of Minnestota, where it was developed. The test is established. Its source is known. There are many sets of statistical analyses about how well this test works for a specific purpose.

Not so these new DNA tests. They have been sold online. There has been a lot of scientific grumbling about this, justifiably so. This is not a game or “interesting fact” about those who use it. It is way too important for that.

The FDA is coming late to this issue but at least the agency got to it just in the nick of time—as a chain drugstore was about to put these tests on their shelves for sale to consumers. To be fair, it is not as if the FDA does not have too much on its plate as it is but still—it is late when what is being tested is only what we are made of genetically. It hardly gets bigger than that.

All the grand pooh-bah Congressional chairmen who needed to sign the letter announcing an investigation signed it. This means they are serious.

You may think these investigations are pointless. Often they are. This time, though, perhaps not, if these hearings only serve to call attention to these tests, their cheap availability and the potential damage associated with error or mismanagement of the results.

• The use of genetic tests, the ones sold to consumers,  for predicting health risks is not yet proven.
• The tests are not regulated in terms of the labs which will analyze samples and report. What quality controls are in place? No one knows.
• What if the test produces very bad news? Let’s say one of those California students learns that he or she has a poor tolerance for dairy products but the family business is a dairy. Future gone? Family freaked out? You bet. Yes, this is unlikely, but it shows how a “simple” finding could have a big impact on the life of the test-taker. Who will be available to counsel someone who is told about a risk which if life-changing? These companies cannot possibly have genetics counselors. There are not enough of them to go around as it is.
• There are no standards set for protecting privacy of test results—and we all have seen in the last few years how sensitive information, stored on laptops, has been breached.

Bloomberg Businessweek

“A plan to make DNA tests available to incoming freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, has critics complaining that the school is endorsing an unproven technology.

“University officials said Thursday that the point wasn’t to predict the likelihood of disease but to promote discussion on the emerging field of genetic testing, the Associated Press reported. The school’s plan was to send test kits to 5,500 new students to analyze genes involved in the body’s reaction to dairy products, folic acid and alcohol.

“We thought that this would be a more engaging vehicle for discussion than having them read a book or an article,” said Mark Schlissel, dean of biology at UC Berkeley.

“But critics say the voluntarily testing could be seen as support for direct-to-consumer gene-testing kits that claim to predict the risk of future health problems.

“Students could assume, “Berkeley gave it to us. It must be good. UC Berkeley would never be giving its incoming students anything bad or controversial,” said Jesse Reynolds, a policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and Society, a bioethics think tank.

“Dr. Muin J. Khoury, director of the National Office of Public Health Genomics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the AP he is concerned that the results could be misunderstood. Using the test for a gene related to how quickly a person absorbs alcohol as an example, he said, “I just worry about 18-year-old kids saying, ‘Oh, I’m a fast metabolizer, I can drink a lot of alcohol, it won’t affect me.”

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek, May 22, 2010

Source: wikipedia