Public Safety Officer Evaluation

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Overview
For new hires as police officers, Dept. of Corrections (DOC) officers, Dept. of Youth Services (DYS), etc. Limbic Resources, Inc. (LR) offers post-employment offer psychological assessment services. This is unusual in that candidates are hired in advance of this assessment. Often we due our assessment as a component of a larger evaluation that includes physical capacity to handle a job, drug testing, etc. under the auspices of a workplace clinical program–typically run by an occupational therapy and/or occupational program. We have worked in such programs as an department of a large hospital, but more recently we have been doing this for private occupational firms. These firms all offer workers’ comp. assessments and rehabilitation services after a job injury, or stress.



Testing & Interview
LR has designed a four-test battery go psychological tests that can be administered in a proctored setting anywhere. At present we are working with Occupational Health Services (OHS) who administer testings each week along with drug screens and physical assessments for all new hires for the Massachusetts DYS. As the four tests are taken, the test protocols filled out for each are then sent to Rebecca who scores them so as to yield PDF reports. Those four test reports are used by Dr. Robert Mullally who sees all candidates for approx. hour-long interviews on site at OHS on Fridays.

Rebecca also sends summaries of the scores to Dr. Jerry Elovitz who enters the scores for the four tests into an Excel database which then organizes the data to yield a ranking of candidates against criteria to determine how well they did on factors important to job success at DYS. Much of this section will be devoted to how to set up the four tests into an Excel spreadsheet which automatically runs programs to achieve those rankings.


Excel Spreadsheet Data Entry
Scoring the four raw test protocols that each job candidate completes yields a long array of those scores (e.g., 23,3,33,22,900…) which are separated by commas. This is called a “comma-separated values” file, and is formatted as a file with the suffix of .csv. A database program such as Panorama or Excel can import those scores (called values) from each CSV file, and knows that each score/value is separated by a comma. Other files use semicolons to separate values, and so on.

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As Rebecca scores the four tests, each yields a CSV file as shown to the left. Each file lists all the scores produced by each test (some can have hundreds of values in them). Scoring software provided by our test publisher uses algorithms to process the values to generate reports, which are produced in the familiar suffixed .pdf file; i.e., a portable document file or PDF. A PDF will open by itself (you don’t need MS Word or another processor to open it) on any computer, making it a truly portable document.

The rest of this section will show you how to enter the values for each csv file into an Excel spreadsheet so as to generate the Roster used by Dr. Mullally to interview and then rate the candidates based on their interview performance as to pass/fail. In order to generate the roster, you need some interpreted scores (not raw scores) from the IPI, so we’ll need the PDF for the IPI to do that.
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