The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-10-23
Mental Tests As Designed For
 Children
By l.. s. BRADY

By L. s. BRADY
 TF YOU find a vacant house on fire,
 what should you do first? Indicate
 your choice by checkmark before one of the following four possibilities:
 1. Ring the door bell.
 2. Call the doctor.
 3. Open the windows to let the smoke out.
 4. Ring the fire-alarm.
 The above is sample of one of the questions asked of high school grad uates in an effort to determine their intelligence" in one of the standard "intelligence tests" The following three questions occur in another of the standard tests for grades four to eight !:
 Can trunk be placed in wagon? Yes. No.
 Is dessert usually served in casks and jugs? Yes. No.
 Arc convictions usually made on in- sufficient evidence? Yes. No.
 On the basis of the scores made in such tests your children are rated ac- cording to their Intelligence" That is, intelligence is assumed to be propor- tional to the number of such questions that are answered according to the way the man who made the tests thinks they ought to be answered.
 However, a great many psychologists are beginning to see the light, and in- stead of calling these tests intelligence tests" or mental tests" they are call ing them particular ability tests" or achievement tests"
 Do not hastily assume, therefore, because your child has not made the score which positive genius would make, according t6F the. theory of the man who made the tests, that your youngster is not in reality the poten- tial genius that you had fondly imag- ined him Cor her) to be.
 The scores for the tests are com piled by means of a statistical process which takes account of averages of a group. This means that such tests of ability are reliable for comparing one group with another group; but that so. far as the prediction of the intelli- gence or ability of the individual is con- cerned, there is wide range of varia- tion above or below the score made.
 For instance, suppose your boy is in the first year of high school and his score was 80. Suppose, too, that 5000 boys of his same age and in the same grade were tested, and they had aver aged 100. Would this necessarily mean that your boy was only eighty-one hun dredths as intelligent as those other boys? Not at all.
 It would mean merely this:. For that one test and Flor the particular abilities tested--anA for those only your boy had put, town on paper cer- tain answers which, when scored, gave him eighty points. III health, lack of interest in the examination, nervous ness, poor training in the abilities tested, lack of interest in the subjects tested-and one or all of these or a hundred other reasons might be the cause of his below-average score.
 Your boy might be far above the average in his ability to sell bonds or drive a car or to sway the thoughts and emotions of his fellow-men, but the test did not measure those abilities, Your boy, then, was merely for one reason or another slightly below the average of other boys of his age and grade in the particular abilities tested and for those only.
 Achievement. tests are xaluable in determining of children; as proSnosti cators of intelligence" they are worth. less. The science of statistics is, it is true, very well advanced and the tech- nique of applying statistics to psychol egy is improving, but the interpretation of the results has so far been subject to so much muddled thinking and has been based on so many improved as- sumptions that it is high time that the abuses which children are sometimes subjected to because of their scores on these tests were exposed.
 The more advanced among the young. CT school of psychologists are quite well aware of the limitations of the present psychological tests and are constantly trying to improve them. But there are others who still cling to the old idea that man is a rational being actuated by thoughts" arising in his brain, and they commit the fallacy of forgetting that man also has viscera, and .conse- quently emotions that it is these which play the dominant part in life, and il is precisely these which our present-day tests do not measure.