I grant that you [and Etaoin and Elizabeth] have valid reasons for your personal misgivings, Jackie, but it is likely that the test was designed to be administered by trained researchers who may have provided standard preliminary instructions to all test-takers. These standard instructions may have eliminated some of the uncertainty some test-takers experience when they take the test online without adequate preliminary instruction.
We don't know if the researchers who designed the test would accept as valid or reliable results obtained online by test-takers who may not have understood all of the required preliminary instructions, and who interpreted the results for themselves.
Chances are the researchers would not consider these online results as valid.
No doubt, the researchers would say that anyone exposed in advance to anyone's published denunciation of the validity of the test [as here] would not be an eligible subject for the test as any such person might be influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by that derogatory opinion.
The danger of 'contamination' is especially great in a situation, like the one here at AWADtalk, where test-takers know one another and they may react unconsciously in sympathy with a test-taker who has published strong doubts about the test before they have had a chance to take the test for themselves.
Similarly, someone whom the test-takers dislike could swing their pre-test opinion in the opposite direction, also unconsciously, by expressing strong support for the test.
In either case, the results would be contaminated.
