Terms of Service

These are the terms for What's My Big Five, a free assessment site operated by Leading Between The Lines. They apply from the moment you use the site, so if anything below is a dealbreaker for you, the right move is simply not to take the test.

The free test, described

The test consists of 50 statements rated on a frequency scale, which amounts to roughly 7 minutes of answering. In return you receive five trait scores, one apiece for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability, each with a Lower, Mid, or Higher range placement. The five are never rolled into one number; reading them side by side is how the model works. All of this, your complete results included, is free. No payment exists anywhere in the flow, and no portion of your results is withheld for money.

The model, and our independence

Scores follow the Big Five, or five-factor, model: the trait taxonomy developed in academic psychology and associated with Lewis Goldberg and with Costa and McCrae. The taxonomy itself is open science; the 50 statements are our own writing. Leading Between The Lines has no affiliation with, license from, or endorsement by Myers-Briggs/MBTI, 16Personalities, DiSC, the Enneagram, or any commercial publisher of Big Five or OCEAN assessments.

What your results are not

Treat your results as a self-portrait taken on a particular day: they reflect how you described yourself, nothing more permanent. The test is not clinical, does not diagnose, does not sort anyone into a personality "type," and cannot stand in for a licensed therapist, counselor, physician, or comparable professional. Results, yours or anyone else's, must not drive hiring, firing, medical, legal, or similarly consequential decisions.

The newsletter

Submitting your email at the results step also adds you to the Leading Between The Lines newsletter. Leaving the list takes one click inside any issue, and going changes nothing about your ability to retake the test.

Rules for using the site

A result only tells you something when the questions are answered candidly and in a single sitting; steering individual questions toward an answer you want defeats the point. Beyond that, the rules are short: no scraping, no deliberate load or disruption, no attempts to reverse-engineer the scoring, and no automated or bot submissions.

Ownership of the content

Everything original here (the 50 statements, the results language, the articles, the design, the code) is the property of Leading Between The Lines. Anyone is welcome to write about the Big Five model; nobody is welcome to republish our specific questions or copy without permission. If you want to reuse something, ask first.

Warranties, liability, and governing law

The site is provided as-is. We offer no warranty of any kind and no promise that your results will prove accurate, complete, or fit for any particular purpose. So far as applicable law permits, you use the site at your own risk, and Leading Between The Lines accepts no responsibility for losses connected with that use or with any period when the site is unavailable. United States law governs this agreement.

Updates and contact

We can revise these terms. Revisions land on this page with a new effective date, and continued use after a revision counts as acceptance of it. Questions go to chad@whatsmybigfive.com.