All 120 IPIP-NEO-120 questions, in the open.

This is the whole instrument: every item Dr. John A. Johnson wrote for the IPIP-NEO-120, printed exactly as he wrote it, sorted under the domain and facet it scores. Nothing here is paraphrased, shortened or softened. The page is generated from the same item file the test itself runs on, so it can’t quietly fall out of date with what you get asked.

It is public because a test that hides its own questions is asking for trust it hasn’t earned. Read the items before you answer them. Afterwards, check that the item you answered feeds the facet we say it feeds — the keying direction is printed next to every line.

Every item is answered on a five-point agreement scale: 1 Strongly Disagree, 2 Disagree, 3 Neutral, 4 Agree, 5 Strongly Agree. Items marked − are reverse-keyed, meaning the answer is flipped before it is added up (a 5 becomes a 1, a 4 becomes a 2). Items marked + are added exactly as answered.

• Facet score = the sum of its four items, after flipping the reverse-keyed ones. Range 4–20.
• Domain score = the sum of that domain’s 24 items, which is also the sum of its six facet scores. Range 24–120.
• Percentile = the raw sum compared against Johnson’s published adult norm tables, not rescaled against your own answers. The formula and the exact means and standard deviations are on the methodology page.

One display note. Johnson’s items are written as sentence fragments (“Worry about things.”) because they follow a shared stem. In the test we show each one in the first person (“I worry about things.”) so it reads like a normal sentence on a phone. That is a presentation change only; the item, the keying and the scoring are untouched, and the wording below is Johnson’s original.

The items are drawn from Lewis Goldberg’s International Personality Item Pool, an open bank of personality items built so that researchers would stop paying licence fees to measure the same constructs. Johnson assembled and validated the 120-item version, which recovers the same five domains and thirty facets as the commercial NEO-PI-R without being it.

Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89. doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003

Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt, & F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe, Vol. 7 (pp. 7–28). Tilburg University Press. ipip.ori.org

Reading the items tells you what is being measured. It doesn’t tell you where you land, and self-estimates are reliably wrong about that. Answering all 120 takes about twelve minutes and gives you all five domain percentiles, the thirty facet scores and the written report, scored against Johnson’s adult norms rather than against your own answers. That is the full test, a one-time $2, report included. No subscription, nothing else to buy.

If you only care about one domain, the free screener runs 24 of these items and returns a single real percentile for that one trait, in about three minutes, with no account.