How the Assessment Scores Your Role
The scoring engine is fully transparent. Here's exactly how 78 questions become a ranked list of 25 roles — step by step, verifiable with pencil and paper.
Three question sections
The 78 questions are organized into three sections with different purposes:
Section 1: Capacity (C1–C8)
Eight capacity questions assess your current situation — time availability, capital access, risk tolerance, technical background. Answers here can generate capacity flags: hard blocks (a role is structurally incompatible with your situation) or soft flags (possible but constrained). These flags appear on your results page alongside each role card.
Section 2: Assessment (Q1–Q64)
The core of the scoring engine. 64 questions map to one or more roles across five weighted dimensions. Each question uses a 7-point Likert scale (Strongly Disagree → Strongly Agree) or a Yes/No variant with a follow-up enjoyment rating.
Section 3: Founder Profile (F1–F6)
Six questions specifically about entrepreneurial orientation — business-building experience, product/market thinking, founder-specific capacity. These feed into the entrepreneurial role scores with additional weight.
Five weighted dimensions
Every question is tagged to one of five dimensions. Scores within each dimension are normalized and then multiplied by the dimension's weight:
| Dimension | Code | Weight |
|---|---|---|
Pain Tolerance How much discomfort, uncertainty, and adversity you can sustain | PT | 30% |
Inspiration / Energy What activities energize vs. drain you | IE | 25% |
Dispositions Behavioral tendencies — how you naturally operate | DI | 20% |
Experience What you've actually done before | EX | 15% |
Skills Specific technical or professional competencies | SK | 10% |
Pain Tolerance dominates (30%) because it's the most common constraint in practice — most mismatches between people and roles come from underestimating what the role actually requires you to endure.
The scoring formula
For each question mapped to a role, the contribution is calculated as:
effective_answer = direction==+1 ? raw : (8 − raw)
normalized = (effective_answer − 1) / 6 → range 0.0–1.0
contrib = normalized × question_weight
The direction field handles reversed questions — some questions are positively correlated with a role (+1), others negatively (−1, meaning a low score is a strong signal).
Per dimension per role, all contributions are summed and normalized by the maximum possible score for that dimension. Then each dimension score is weighted and summed to produce a raw total score. Finally, all 25 role scores are normalized so the highest score becomes 100% — the rest are percentages relative to it.
Transparent breakdown on your results page
After completing the assessment, each role card on your results page has a collapsible accordion: “What shaped this result?” It shows the specific questions that most strongly contributed to that role's score, along with your answer and which dimension it fed into.
This is by design. The goal is that you can look at your top role's contributors and recognize yourself — or spot a misalignment that suggests a different interpretation.
Full audit CSV (admin)
Every intermediate calculation is logged in a per-submission audit CSV available to administrators — effective answer, normalized score, per-dimension sums, weighted totals. The entire scoring pipeline can be reproduced from the raw data.
See the scoring engine applied to your own answers.
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