A TIME tradition--the Current Affairs Test which was interrupted as one of our wartime economies--will be back in TIME in the issue of Oct. 14th.

As many of you will recall, we dropped the test from the magazine in the spring of 1942 because of the wartime paper shortage. It had appeared regularly in TIME (at first, twice, then three times a year) since the issue of March 11, 1935. The original test was modeled after a similar one prepared for the American Council on Education by Dr. Alvin C. Eurich, now vice president of Stanford University, and Elmo C. Wilson, now research director of the Columbia Broadcasting System. They became the mentors of TIME'S Current Affairs Test, and they still are--aided and abetted by TIME'S editorial and education staffs.

Although the test did not appear in the magazine from the days of Pearl Harbor, it survived in pamphlet form for the benefit of colleges, schools, clubs and discussion groups, various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, and for those of you who wrote in to ask for it. The schools, many of which enter the test marks on their pupils' records, and the U.S. Army, which used the test at home and abroad for briefing soldiers on the news, had a special need for it which we felt obliged to fulfill.

Copies of the forthcoming test, in pamphlet form, have already gone out to most of these schools and groups.

In the past all sorts of people have found the Current Affairs Test engaging--as a challenge to their knowledge of the news, and as a contest in which it is not easy to get a perfect score. Once, the warden of Clinton Prison, Dannemora, N.Y., gave the test to 200 of his brightest inmates under the most durable of honor systems. They averaged, according to the warden, 86 per cent. That's not bad, as the millions of TIME readers, students, and others who have taken the tests, can testify.

But high scores are sometimes incidental. This year, for example, a private school teacher wrote us that after taking the test "quite a number of the boys felt the need for a special course in geography, got up a delegation and asked the headmaster for it. So here I am saddled with such a course with 26 students in it. I shall try to make it a whopper. . . ."

Those of you who live overseas will receive the Current Affairs Test for the first time. It is scheduled to appear in our International editions, so that all of TIME'S readers can take a crack at it. We have tried to make the revived test a fair one--not too easy, not too hard--hoping you will have the same fun wrestling with it that we know many of you have had in the past.

Cordially,

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