The Monday Excerpt: Uncle Sam and the Psychologists

Every Monday I will post a brief excerpt from my upcoming book, Choose Wisely: the SAT, the ACT, and You. This is good for you because you get to read, for free, what other people will have to pay for later. This is good for me because it means I have to actually write the book if I'm going to have anything to post! So, win-win.

In this week's excerpt, we learn a little bit about the direct ancestors of the SAT: the Army Alpha and Beta Tests.  If there are any psychologists in the audience, please don't be offended by the ire I direct at your profession: it is intended solely for a handful of your less-than-illustrious predecessors. You can read the beginning of this chapter here.

(A) The United States Army

Uncle Sam and the Psychologists

Our story begins, like any good epic, in the middle of a war. The conflict in this case is World War One; the setting, Vineland, New Jersey. Seven psychologists are sitting in a smoke-filled conference room, discussing the details of a test – not the SAT, which doesn't exist yet – that will change America forever.

Psychologists: they don't get no respect!

The psychologists have a problem: their field doesn't get the respect from society that they feel it deserves. Psychology is not considered a “hard” science like physics or chemistry. A physicist can measure the speed of light; a chemist can measure the molecular weight of benzene; but how do you measure what goes on inside a person's head? (MRI machines are still a few decades away.) These psychologists are determined to come up with a test that can objectively determine how smart a person is and to give that test to as many people as possible. Once they get some data, maybe they'll get some respect, too.

The United States army also has a problem. America has just entered the war, and now the army needs to recruit a whole lot of soldiers, ASAP. The best and brightest of these new recruits will become officers, while the rest of them are destined to be grunts—cannon fodder for the trenches. It is quite literally a matter of life and death. But how is the army supposed to tell the braniacs from the blockheads? It can't interview every recruit individually since there are millions and millions of them. It can't use high school grades since less than 20% of Americans actually finish high school. And it can't give them written subject tests on things like History or Math since a lot of them can't read.

The army needs a test for intelligence that can be administered to millions of people. The psychologists want to create a test for intelligence that they can administer to millions of people. Sounds like a match made in heaven, don't it?

After a few weeks of round-the-clock work, our psychologists have emerged from the conference room with two tests which, they say, “do not measure occupational fitness nor educational attainment; they measure intellectual ability.”  Well, that sounds good: tests like that should help the army separate the smart from the merely book smart. Let's see whether that claim holds water.

Next week: the exciting continuation, complete with actual test questions from the Alpha and Beta examinations!