Oxford Capacity Analysis

In his 1951 book, Science of Survival, he recommended the use of existing psychometric exams, including the California Test for Mental Maturity.

[9] Her first effort, the American Personality Analysis (APA), failed to satisfy Hubbard so, in 1959, he asked a friend and Scientologist, Ray Kemp, to broaden the scope of the test.

[10]The Scientology organization first announced its test in an article by Kemp, who hailed the OCA in the pages of Certainty, the magazine of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists in London.

[11] Later, the church gave credit to Hubbard for the test and trademarked the terms "OCA" and "Oxford Capacity Analysis.

However, following a recruitment drive in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1960, the organization began to use the test on members of the public.

In the case of preclears, they should, if taking several weeks of processing, be tested at the end of every twenty-five hours.The other use, more visible to non-Scientologists, is that of recruitment, using the OCA as a tool to attract new people for Scientology services.

From this follows his or her getting processing and training as sold to the person by PrR [Promotion & Registration] at the same time as the evaluation is done.The results of the test are invariably negative, as various reporters have found: With a serious expression, another woman called Emily – a long haired, pretty 20-something – took me into a booth and with a deadpan voice told me it was 'well, not very good.'

'[18][better source needed]A university student who visited the HASI [Hubbard Association of Scientologists International] [...] was told that, though he had a high IQ and was a genius and could do anything he wanted to, his character, as the graph showed, was defective, that he was mentally unstable and that he was going to have a mental breakdown in eighteen months' time unless he had Scientology help, and it was also suggested to him that he had homosexual tendencies.

[19]Former Scientologists have spoken of how everything that is ostensibly defective in a person is purposefully emphasized in OCA test results.

[2] Individuals who have undertaken the OCA have described how they were given just such negative evaluations; as one young Sydney woman put it in an interview in 1980: After they had graphed the results of my test, this lady came up to me and said: "Well, I don't want to [...] it's not a personal comment on you, you understand, we are not personally trying to put you down, but this is your graph,' and it was just scraping along the bottom, way below normal.

She hit on a few nerves that were really sensitive at the time – I'd split with my boyfriend, I'd only just moved into a place of my own, I didn't have a job, I didn't have any money and I was feeling really lonely and insecure.Hubbard advised that the hopelessness of the testee's predicament (or "ruin," as he put it) should be emphasized by the tester, who should continually state that Scientology services are what is necessary for the situation to be salvaged: Remarks that "Scientology can improve this or that characteristic" or "auditing can remedy that" or "Processing can change this" or "Training can stabilize that" should be used repeatedly during the evaluation for the sake of impingement.

A clever evaluator can surmise such things as domestic grief, trouble with possessions, etc much more easily than a fortune teller.

Alternatives are to be mentioned – "psychology, psychoanalysis, Dale Carnegie, Confidence Courses, Mental Exercises"[21] – but only for the purpose of dismissing them: "these things had a very limited application and you could get yourself terribly involved in mysteries, expenses and wasted time, before you found any solutions to your difficulties.

[24] It has often been used without alteration, but has also been issued in modified versions; for instance, MasterTech markets the OCA with minor changes and calls it the Personnel Potential Analysis Test.

"The overall impression one gets [from the test manual]," said a psychologist testifying before a public inquiry into Scientology in Victoria, Australia in the mid-1960s, "is that it has been prepared by somebody with a smattering of psychometrics rather than by someone who is really competent in the field.

"[19] A more detailed investigation was undertaken in 1970 by the British Psychological Society (BPS) at the request of politician Sir John Foster.

[3]Another detailed evaluation was carried out in 1981 by Gudmund Smith, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Lund, Sweden.

This time the investigation was done for a prosecutor attacking a local branch of Narconon, the church's drug rehab offshoot.

Smith cited numerous methodological and empirical flaws in the OCA, describing it as a "terrible mess," and concluded (in translation from the original Swedish): The Oxford Capacity Analysis consists to a high degree of unclearly formulated, ambiguous or misleading questions.

[5]The OCA also came under scrutiny in Queensland, Australia in 1990, when it emerged that scores of people had lost their jobs after a Brisbane-based personnel management company had given them poor OCA evaluations, "us[ing] such brutal terms they can read like character assassinations, leaving employers with little choice but to fire staff.

[22]The Church of Scientology has reportedly been unable to produce information to substantiate the validity of the Oxford Capacity Analysis.

A London Evening Standard reporter described the unease she felt after she had taken the OCA test: Later, as I sat on the Tube thinking about this small taste of Scientology, I was able to brush it off.

In truth, though, while I sat in that office and listened to a total stranger utterly trash my personality and character – on the basis of no evidence at all – I began to feel vaguely insecure.

The Church of Scientology claims to help people attain a deeper, richer existence – but it clearly does so by erasing all sense of self-respect first.

The methodological flaws of the OCA were such that, in the view of Professor Gudmund Smith, "Analysis for evaluation of an individual is, in my opinion, manifestly unethical.

"[5] Testifying in a court case in Ireland in 2003, Dr Declan Fitzgerald of University College Dublin said he believed that the OCA "impinged on people's self-esteem and was highly manipulative."

In its 1970 report, the British Psychological Society's working party was even harsher with its criticism, declaring that: No reputable psychologist would accept the procedure of pulling people off the street with a leaflet, giving them a 'personality test' and reporting back in terms that show the people to be 'inadequate,' 'unacceptable' or in need of 'urgent' attention.

In a clinical setting a therapist would only discuss a patient's inadequacies with him with the greatest of circumspection and support, and even then only after sufficient contact for the therapist–patient relationship to have been built up.

To report back a man's inadequacies to him in an automatic, impersonal fashion is unthinkable in responsible professional practice.

The prime aim of the procedure seems to be to convince these people of their need for the corrective courses run by the Scientology organisations.