Tester

Mental testers define an individual's intelligence in many ways, usually as "the capacity for abstracting" or "the ability to meet new situations." One thing on which most agree, however, is that its quality or quantity does not change. Thirty years ago Professor Alfred Binet and a Sorbonne colleague, relying on this principle, devised the first widely used intelligence test. It consisted of a series of 54 questions, groups of which were to be given to children of various ages. The highest group a child could pass decided his mental age, which, when divided by his physical age, determined his Intelligence Quotient (I. Q.). In, theory he might go on taking graded tests all his life without altering his I. Q.

Purpose of the I. Q. is to sort out children of exceptional intelligence who are likely to need exceptional educational treatment. Last year some 250,000 U. S. schoolchildren, inmates of juvenile delinquent institutions and miscellaneous persons, had their I. Q.s scored by a revision of the Binet-Simon test, called the Stanford-Binet and published by Dr. Lewis Madison Terman in 1916. Last week Stanford University's spry, 60-year-old Psychologist Terman and his associate, Dr. Maude Amanda Merrill, were guiding through the presses of Houghton Mifflin Co. the first revision ever made in this prime educational tool.

The new Stanford-Binet, like the old, is oral. A new edition of Professor Terman's manual, Measuring Intelligence, gives instructions for administering and scoring the questions. To avoid duplication in the case of students tested twice in one year, these have been increased from a single set of 90 to two sets of 129 apiece.

A course of the whole 129 in either set would last 16 years. Two-year-olds have a new test, consisting mainly of a box of toy objects, such as an automobile and a shoe, which they can identify by pointing and gurgling. Older children point out the larger of two balls, detect verbal and pictorial absurdities. "Superior adults" restate proverbs in their own words, fill out blanks in sentences, find antonyms.

No question was admitted by Testers Terman and Merrill without being tried out by seven field investigators on some 3,000 schoolchildren scattered over the U. S. To keep the children standard the investigators ruled out schools in tenement neighborhoods, swank suburban academies, the entire pre-school group of children in Colorado who for some reason tested too high. Some questions had to be discarded. Tester Terman found, for instance, that a picture of a cat with two legs did not always seem absurd to smart children. Nor could they agree sufficiently on: What can scissors and knife do that spoons cannot? What can cat do that dog cannot? What can sun do that moon and stars cannot? Chief worry of Tester Terman, besides that of having any of his 258 questions published and thus made easy for young newspaper and magazine readers, is that the Stanford-Binet is often given by incompetent or overanxious persons. He takes little stock in many of the fabulous I. Q.s that are continually being reported to him. Current champion is an anonymous 9-year-old Brooklyn boy whose I. Q. is supposedly 230.

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