THE BIG FIVE
The scientifically-validated 5-dimension personality model: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. 20 questions, 4 per trait, for a reliable snapshot of your trait profile.
Why only 20 questions?
Short answer: because the science says 20 is enough. The Mini-IPIP is the peer-reviewed validated short form of the Big Five, published in Psychological Assessment in 2006. It uses 4 items per trait (20 total) and correlates roughly 0.90 with the full 120-item IPIP-NEO.
You can spend 30 minutes on a 300-item instrument and get a more finely-grained picture of sub-traits (the facets beneath each Big Five dimension). But for the five top-level traits themselves, 20 validated items give you a reliable snapshot. We chose speed + validity over granularity.
The items in this test are the exact validated Mini-IPIP items, not ones we wrote.