By Laura Acuff, Staff Writer
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) helps students find a date through its annual Valentine’s Day Compatibility Test, allowing participants to make the test as serious or as lighthearted as they choose.
The ACM Valentine’s Day Compatibility Test will be available to take online this week at http://cupid.acu.edu until 12:01 a.m. Sunday.
Designed to match compatible individuals through a personality deducing questionnaire, the test can be taken for free, and students can purchase results for $1 in the Campus Center Monday through Thursday of next week. Results will include 10 compatible matches and five incompatible people to avoid. Students may also request compatibility ratings between themselves and specific people, said test administrator Jonathan Gray, senior computer science major from Springfield, Tenn.
“It’s interesting,” said Dr. Ray Pettit, ACM faculty advisor and business professor. “It’s not a hardcore, super serious thing. It’s kind of for fun, and they use techniques that companies use to do matchmaking and collect certain types of data.”
Results of the surveys are processed through a mathematical method ACM members and ACU mathematics professors designed several years ago, and despite its fun intentions, Gray said some couples who met through the compatibility test have built serious relationships as a result.
“It’s trying to cater to both audiences,” Gray said. There are some photos on our Web site of some couples that actually met on our survey. They’ve graduated and moved on and are still actually married. We’ve had some interesting results over the years. We want it to be a legitimate test, but we realize that legitimate tests are often not fun to take, so we try to keep it reasonably short and try to make it fun too.”
Pettit also said the tests have potential to spark serious relationships.
“I think it has potential to find compatibility,” Pettit said. “You know there are dating services and matchmaking services out there that take that kind of data from people, personalities, interests and that kind of thing and try to find compatibility. You take things you find out about people that would otherwise take a long time to find out, whereas, with a questionnaire, you find out up front.”
Amanda Buchanan, sophomore psychology major from Lubbock, said she would be open to taking the test for fun, but she has reservations about its more serious implications.
“It’s more of a joke,” Buchanan said. “If I didn’t have a boyfriend, I would do it just to see who I was matched up with because I think it would be funny. I think that if someone is desperate enough to try and use it to try to find a serious relationship, they’re in trouble in the first place because you should allow God to guide you instead of seeking out ways to hook yourself up to random people that are probably just doing it as a joke and aren’t going to take you very seriously.”
