"Career Aptitude Test for Designers(CATD)" was developed to guide design-majoring college students and high school students, who would want to diagnose their aptitude as a potential designer and to explore the specific majors within the design field (Gil, 2009). The test is composed of 55 items which describe typical interests, skills, attitudes and behaviors that lead to the tendency to be a designer. The test is comprised of self-report items on 5-categories of the Likert scale. For the development of the CATD, a series of three studies were conducted consecutively for three years. In the standardizing process of the CATD, a national sample of 766 four-year college students majoring in design in South Korea had been surveyed as a norm group. Out of the studies, two subscales of the CATD, "Basic Design Competency" and "Advanced Design Competency", were extracted. Each subscale showed reliability of .89 and .90. The subscale of "Basic Design Competency" is consisted of 7 factors (formative ability, imagination, dexterity, creativity, computer applicability, planning ability, and sensibility), and 5 factors (industrial design, space design, fashion design, multimedia design, and visual design) were included in the subscale of "Advanced Design Competency". Analyses have shown that the CATD had an adequate factor structure to represent the design aptitude of students.
The present study is a further investigation of CATD's validity through the administration of the test to other samples of 1,340 Korean college students majoring in design to examine the adequacy of the internal component structure of the CATD commercialized in 2009. The empirical identification for construct or factors which comprise the aptitude as a potential designers is in the beginning stage in Korea, so this empirical validation study carries on much importance and eventually it will help students in deciding their career.
The subjects were students of 13 four-year universities, and the CATD were mailed to each university and administered to them by their graduate assistants or staff members in department office. 1204 responses were analyzed as a reliable data through the use of Spss 19.0. Test validity were collected by conducting factor analysis, correlations among test and subtests.