At the beginning of the twentieth century, school administrators in Paris wanted to relieve overcrowding by removing youngsters who did not have the capacity to benefit from an academic education. They called in the psychologist Alfred Binet and asked him to devise a test to identify those children. The test that Binet developed was the precursor of a wide variety of tests that try to assign intelligence a numerical score. Binet's approach focused on finding children who were least likely to benefit from an education. Today, intelligence testing is also used to identify children with special strengths who can benefit from a richer teaching program