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IQ tests in america had been around only since nineteen ten so in that seven or eight year
period
they had been quite successful they were already used in courts of law doctors were
already using them they were used in
%uh i would say hundreds of schools and school districts by nineteen seventeen the beginning
of the war
they weren't yet used by the military so the psychologists new here's our chance to
pitch them and use our IQ tests
and they did the army didn't really like them much
um and they took it reluctantly
but one of the reasons they hesitated and forced psychologists to think about
it was
you're gonna test
all of these recruits one-on-one as they come in through the tent flap %uh all the new recruits
which is how IQ tests were done they still are %uh part of the time one of the big
insisted that this is the way it's gotta be done yes it's way too inefficient yeah
and so that's why IQ test are eventually about institutional efficiency is because the psychologists
start to figure out that we need a way of testing groups of people and doing it quickly
and efficiently
and there was a guy named frederick kelly who happened to be the dean of the university of
kansas education department
and
%uh he came up with this novel testing technology method called the multiple test question
and that was in about nineteen fifteen nineteen sixteen multiple choice question
sorry multiple choice question thank you
and %uh the psychologists had learned about it just before nineteen seventeen and so one
of them
this guy Lewis Terman from stanford when he showed up to the meetings in new jersey
in nineteen seventeen said voila
this is the way we're going to test
large groups of people we're not going to do it one-on-one
and there was again debate about didn't seem very scientific to them you know it wasn't
going to work anyway they had to adopt it otherwise it wouldn't be a part of the war effort
they adopted it and
i mean it worked in the sense that psychologists gained entree and it worked in the sense that
after the war boy they could tell what they had putatively done to help the war effort
although it's proven that they didn't help the war effort at all
but they helped themselves tremendously in their PR effort
this excerpt is brought to you by the massachusetts school of law
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