GROUP TESTS AND THE
CLASSIFICATION OF WWI
ARMY RECRUITS
Given the American penchant for efficiency, it was
only natural that researchers would seek group mental
tests to supplement the relatively time-consuming
individual intelligence tests imported from
France. Among the first to develop group tests was
Pyle (1913), who published schoolchildren norms
for a battery consisting of such well-worn measures
as memory span, digit-symbol substitution, and oral
word association (quickly writing down words in response
to a stimulus word). Pintner (1917) revised
and expanded Pyle’s battery, adding to it a timed
cancellation test in which the child crossed out the
letter a wherever it appeared in a body of text.
But group tests were slow to catch on, partly
because the early versions still had to be scored
laboriously by hand. The idea of a completely objective
test with a simple scoring key was inconsistent
with tests such as logical memory for which
the judgment of the examiner was required in scoring.
Most amazing of all—at least to anyone who
has spent any time as a student in American
schools—the multiple-choice question was not yet
in general use.
The slow pace of developments in group testing
picked up dramatically as the United States entered
World War I in 1917. It was then that Robert
M. Yerkes, a well-known psychology professor at
Harvard, convinced the U.S. government and the
Army that all of its 1.75 million recruits should be
given intelligence tests for purposes of classification
and assignment (Yerkes, 1919). Immediately
upon being commissioned into the Army as a
colonel,Yerkes assembled a Committee on the Examination
of Recruits, which met at the Vineland
school in New Jersey to develop the new group tests
for the assessment of Army recruits. Yerkes chaired
the committee; other famous members included
Goddard and Terman.
Two group tests emerged from this collaboration:
the Army Alpha and the Army Beta. It would
be difficult to overestimate the influence of the
Alpha and Beta upon subsequent intelligence tests.
The format and content of these tests inspired developments
in group and individual testing for
decades to come. We discuss these tests in some detail
so that the reader can appreciate their influence
on modern intelligence tests.