[May 1959]

To the Editor of The Saturday Evening Post

Dear Sir:

There are two stories, both undoubtedly apocryphal, told of the late George Lyman Kittredge. In the first story, Professor Kittredge goes to the desk of the British Museum in London and describes to the attendant the item of Shakespeareana he seeks. The attendant replies that such information cannot be found in the British Museum and adds, “The only man alive who can answer your question is a professor called Kittredge at Harvard in the U.S.A.” This story leads into the second: When asked why he had never taken a Ph.D., Professor Kittredge replied, “Who would ask me the questions?.

It is said that the quality of righteous indignation is all but dead, but it is the emotion I usually feel when I read any aptitude or intelligence test; and I felt that emotion strongly when I read the sample questions on pages 24 and 25 of your May 9 [1959] issue. [Article entitled "What Do Intelligence Tests Really Prove" by John L. Cobbs] Much too much depends, as Professor Kittredge might have said, on who asks the questions. My observation has convinced me that the questions are written by half educated young men and women and are passed upon by higher ups who may be competent but who are either too lazy or too complaisant to subject every question to the scrutiny it deserves.

No sour grapes be read into the foregoing statement, because me and mine — I, my wife, and our two sons — have been conspicuously successful in aptitude and intelligence tests. It might almost be said that our family genes carry a special aptitude for special aptitude tests. This is an aptitude for guessing or discerning the precise degree of ignorance of the person who wrote the questions.

I will cite an example that did not arise from an aptitude or intelligence test but is nevertheless a dramatic illustration of the problem that faces the student taking such a test. I was asked by a television quiz show question: “Who was chief counsel for the defense at the Scopes Trial?” This created a dilemma. I knew that the correct answer was John Neale. But I was almost as sure that the “correct” answer the quizmaster had on his card was Clarence Darrow. The writer of the question had probably drawn a false conclusion from a Broadway play of a few years back, but that is beside the point. I reasoned that if the person who wrote the question had known the true answer, he would have considered this question too difficult to use. If I wanted to play wholly safe I would give the answer Neale, be adjudged wrong, and receive an apology and reinstatement later. Or I could answer Darrow, avoiding all the nuisance and argument but risking justifiable disqualification if by remote chance the author of the question did know what he was doing. Since I was answering orally, I was able to cover myself by saying, “The correct answer is Neale but I’m sure you have Darrow written on the card.” (Sure enough, the incorrect answer Darrow was written on the card.) If I had been taking a multiple choice test judged by automatic punched card machines I would have had to guess and no amount of knowledge could have protected me.

Dry and hot and the air hazy with the sun shining through red dust motes, red from the clay of all the streets, heavy with the heat which made the air seem to be a dancing, swirling weighted something as far as possible removed from what one means by the word atmosphere.

In the twelve sample questions cited in The Saturday Evening Post, there were seven — more than half! — that were imperfect to some extent. I will specify.

Question 2.[1] None of the five answers is exactly opposite the primary sense of languish. The official answer, (C) thrive, in one of its secondary senses (not justified etymologically) is supportable, but I would undertake in debate to justify swell in the sense in which Donne used it against another sense of languish, or strive in one of its senses against languish as Shakespeare used it. The conclusion is inescapable that the answers were selected heedlessly and that the superior student must guess what the author had in mind.

Question 3.[2] While the official answer, abuse, is the only choice, no one with any sense of rhetoric could have made it a reciprocal, antonym or “opposite” of plaudit. For one thing, the two words are never parallel in construction. The parallel of abuse in the intended sense would be not plaudit but plaudits. Furthermore, the intended sense of abuse is slightly substandard..

Question 5.[3] This is a quotation, of course, but would a conscientious educator wish to impose on any student the unscientific implication that iron rusts from disuse?

Question 6.[4] This is unexceptionable as it stands but becomes suspect when considered in connection with 8.

Question 7.[5] This is the most indefensible of all the questions. The official answer is (B). Obviously, the author of the question did not approach it objectively. (B) can be correct only if the import of the key words is alleviation of pain. If the import of the key words were solely antiphlogistic[6], then (A) would be correct. If the import were that of superficial application, then (D) would be correct. There is even possible an argument that (B) cannot be correct, since it expresses the abstract while the key words express the physical; and the student might be forgiven on such an assumption if he rejected (B) entirely and tried to guess between (A) and (D).

Question 8.[7] Repetition is a frequentative word, and it might be held — as no doubt the author of the question did hold — that only dissipation among the answers can match; but on the other hand there may be an aspect of causation here, and while repetition may cause monotony, does dissipation cause depravity or does depravity cause dissipation? Can attempt be read as a collective and be considered as likely a contributory to achievement as repetition is to monotony? — for neither has an absolute effect, unless monotony is defined as repetition of a tone, in which case the key words are inherently tautological and an educated man could never have posed the question in the first place; or else the first word, repetition, must be considered specifically as an element in the definition of the second, monotony, whereupon (A) becomes the only answer that Is wholly appropriate. If depravity and dissipation can be reversed in order to justify the answer, then why cannot shelf and edge in Question 6?

Question 12.[8] No one of the four answers is necessarily correct, as the question is written. Is it to be assumed that each group of five gumdrops taken from the assortment will consist of one of each color? The odds are 25 to 1 against this. How large is the stock? If it is considered to be infinite, then the only correct answer to the question is infinity. A correct answer to the question cannot be supplied until essential additional information is given. In this case the bright student can easily guess what the examiner had in mind, but he is unlikely to retain much respect for the examiner or for the test.

Admittedly I have quibbled and split hairs in some of my criticisms, but quibbling and hairsplitting are what one must expect when he makes positive statements to a mass audience, as I must do professionally. When the audience comprises twenty million or more students, the number of those disillusioned must be great even if the percentage of the whole is small. The student’s sense of frustration must reach its height when he encounters a question such as No. 7, where answers (A) and (D) are intelligent and (C) and (E) are stupid but all are rejected indiscriminately by the unfeeling machinery.;

I will grant again that the task of testing the millions of students could not be even approached without the use of automatic machinery and without the system of multiple choice tests now in use, but I will not grant that the preparation of the questions must be assigned — as it is — to the youngest and lowest paid employees of our entire educational system. There must be thousands of trained editors and educators who are capable of detecting flaws in questions. Let the questions be submitted to such a panel, volunteer and unpaid. The idea of the aptitude or intelligence test is a good one and it is vitiated principally by the inadequacy of the test questions.

Yours sincerely,

Albert H. Morehead

Notes:

[1] Opposites: Choose the lettered word most nearly opposite in meaning to the word in capital letters. 2. LANGUISH: (A) terminate (B) swell (C) thrive (D) enjoy (E) strive

[2] Opposites. PLAUDIT (A)abuse (B) indecisiveness (C) elegance (D) insight (E) silence

[3] Sentence Completion: Choose the word or set of words that best fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole. 5. Iron rusts from _____, stagnant water loses its purity; even so does _____ sap the vigor of the mind. (A) disuse, inactive (B) abuse, delinquency (C) misuse, imitation (D) acid, alcohol (E) age, misuse

[4] Analogies: Select the lettered pair of words which are related in the same way as the words of the original pair. 6. BORDERLAND - COUNTRY (A) water - land (B) rock - soil (C) margin - page (D) danger - safety (E) shelf - edge

[5] Analogies. 7. OINTMENT - BURN (A) water - fire (B) sympathy - sorrow (C) victim - crime (D) powder - face (E) pain - agony

[6] Antiinflammatory

[7] Analogies. 8. REPETITION - MONOTONY (A) famiiarity - recognition (B) interest - boredom (C) dissipation - depravity (D) attempt - achievement (E) callowness - inexperience

[8] Mathematics. 12, If gumdrops come in 5 colors, what is the smallest nuber of assorted gumdrops a child would have to buy to be sure of getting at least three of the same color? (A) 3 (B) 7 (C) 11 (D) 15