In the first 10 years after its publication, the F-Scale Test attracted a great deal of interest and enthusiasm from the scientific community. The F-Scale Test has been used in hundreds of studies, but today the scientific consensus holds that the test clearly has problems.
For one thing, the authors of the test did not control for socioeconomic differences or other demographic factors. Secondly, the authors exclusively tried to test for authoritarian beliefs on the right while ignoring authoritarianism on the left. Thirdly, the test has been found to have poor internal validity, suggesting that it may not measure a single personality dimension (i.e. receptivity to authoritarianism) the way its authors claim.