ShareThisIt started as the brainchild of two University of Minnesota professors and became a global sensation.
It remains the most widely used personality test in the world, assessing the emotional stability of millions of people.
But now the legendary MMPI -- the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test -- is stirring up some emotional turmoil of its own.
The 70-year-old test has undergone a dramatic makeover recently, sparking a bitter feud among its leading scholars. The debate, which started in professional journals, has boiled over into courtrooms and triggered at least two internal investigations at the university.
The school, which still earns about $1 million a year in MMPI royalties, says it merely put a 21st-century spin on a test created during the Great Depression. Today, the MMPI is routinely used to screen candidates for highly sensitive jobs -- pilots, police, nuclear power plant operators -- and in charged legal situations, such as child custody cases.
But critics say the changes, such as a new scoring system and a form that eliminated 40 percent of the questions, damaged the test's credibility and backfired on some patients.
One complaint is that a newly added feature, called the "Fake Bad Scale," is used to discredit victims in personal injury cases, mistakenly branding some people as faking or exaggerating symptoms.
Both sides say they're trying to protect the legacy of one of the university's greatest single achievements.
"It's being used to make critical decisions about people's lives," said Carolyn Williams, a retired University of Minnesota professor and an MMPI expert. "People are being hurt."
But the university says that the test has been improved, and blames the controversy on a "small vocal" minority. "When you introduce a new version of a test, there are often people who oppose any changes," said Beverly Kaemmer, associate director of the University of Minnesota Press, which oversees the MMPI.
University investigators found nothing inappropriate about the MMPI changes. But they did fault the University of Minnesota Press for relying on an advisory board that consisted entirely of two scientists -- psychologists Auke Tellegen and Yossef Ben-Porath -- who co-wrote the new test and stand to profit from its sales.
Tellegen, a retired University of Minnesota professor, calls critics "the Mult Cult" -- a twist on Multiphasic -- a small group "very dedicated and strongly identified with the old MMPI."
Ben-Porath, a Kent State University professor, agrees: "There's a cohort within the Mult Cult that really believes ... that the test is perfect and any change, by definition, is for the worse."
Williams and her husband, James Butcher, who led the last big revision 20 years ago, dismiss those accusations.
"They have changed the MMPI so drastically it is not the same instrument," said Butcher, a retired psychology professor who has written dozens of books about the test. "I'm not an old gray-haired guy sitting in a cult," he added. "These folks have made a new test and they are using the name MMPI ... with all the 70 years of tradition to market their changed instrument."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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