CHAPTER VIII

MENTAL TESTS IN INDUSTRY

The case for scientific mental tests as a prerequisite to the employment of beginners in business and industry has been well put by Dr. Henry C. Link. In addressing a convention of California railroad men, Doctor Link said:

“Would you, gentlemen, enter into a contract to buy material from a concern, the excellence of whose product you had grave reason to doubt? Would you place orders to the extent of three and one half millions of dollars a year, waive inspection of material, accept whatever was offered you, and make no effort to get your money’s worth? You would not—not if you expected to hold your job. And yet, that is what you are doing with respect to the public education system of California. In 1916 the railroads of this state paid in operative taxes $7,151,583. Of this sum 51 per cent., or $3,647,300, was used for purposes of public education.

“_The boys and girls sent you from the public schools you take into your service, sometimes after a perfunctory mental examination, generally with none_; in other words, _you waive inspection_, and then complain of the character of material after it has reached you and been paid for.”

It is, of course, in the case of the untried beginner in business or industrial life, the boy or girl fresh from school who has as yet had no opportunity to discover or to demonstrate his or her ability or capacity, that the application of scientific mental tests is most essential.

The skilled worker of long experience, master of his craft or of one or another of the specialized mechanical operations that enter so largely into modern industrial processes, has already found a definite place in the scheme of things and a simple trade or performance test is all that is required to indicate where that place is. For the present, at least, we are concerned with the worker of this class only long enough to point out, in passing, that a generally adopted scheme of intelligence measurement might have disclosed the possession by any individual of this group of abilities that would have given him a broader field and a happier and more useful existence, had he and those responsible for giving him a start in life been made aware of them early enough. Even to-day, when he has been engaged in his narrowly limited field of work for the better part of his active working life, he may have latent or undeveloped mental capacity such as would qualify him for more important, better-paid employment were some means provided for disclosing its existence.

There is, in fact, no degree or kind of employment for which a more intelligent and satisfactory selection of employees cannot be made by means of properly devised mental tests, accurately applied, than by any other method now in use. Under the direction of Dr. Walter Dill Scott the Carnegie School of Scientific Salesmanship of Pittsburgh has demonstrated the usefulness of the scientific method when applied not only in the selection and training of salesmen but for the choosing of men qualified for the most important executive positions in large industrial and business establishments. A large number, possibly as many as a hundred, of the largest industrial corporations of America have already (1919) adopted in whole or in part some system of scientific mental tests for the classification and grading of present employees, the selection of new employees, and the filling of vacancies by promotion. It is the unanimous testimony, whenever a properly devised system of tests has been applied in accordance with scientific methods and without prejudice, that the actual saving in time and expense as well as in the disorganization resulting from a heavy “labour turnover” has in every case been highly profitable from the employer’s viewpoint, while it almost goes without saying that the benefit to the employee in being accurately placed in the position in which he is best fitted by his natural mental endowment and capacity to function makes for individual contentment and satisfaction and for steadier and presumably higher earning power than the old hit-or-miss method could possibly do.

Next to the beginner in industry or business, the boy or girl starting his or her vocational career, the class to which the application of scientific mental tests is of the greatest benefit to employer and worker alike is the large group of unskilled, untrained workers, men and women of no particular trade, the “floaters” and seasonal workers, who turn their hands to whatever employment opportunity offers without developing especial skill at any one recognized trade or occupation.

In our modern industrial system, a very considerable part of the personnel of our factories, shops, and stores consists of this class of untrained workers. They try their hands at many things and fail in most. They constitute the majority of those who respond to “Help Wanted” advertisements and are willing to try any sort of work; their chief occupation in life is hunting for jobs.

This need not remain forever true. Because there is not in general use any intelligent or accurate method of determining whether or not any one of these unskilled, untrained workers possesses the elementary mental capacities requisite for a particular sort of employment, it is not surprising that most of them fail to make good in the jobs into which they are indiscriminately shovelled. Yet the great majority of them do possess mental capacity of a nature and degree which, once it is ascertained, indicates their definite fitness for some particular sort of work no less than it does their definite unfitness for many other kinds of work which they are prone to undertake.

Just as war conditions brought into the Army an enormous mass of young men whose capacity and special abilities had to be determined by scientific tests before they could be assigned to the places where they could most usefully serve in the military scheme of things, so the same exigency of war brought into the industries of the country, largely centred upon the production of munitions of war, millions of women without industrial experience or vocational training but upon whose efforts the nation had mainly to rely for the output of weapons, ammunition, military equipment and accessories without which the Army and Navy could not have functioned. In a large class of plants engaged in munition production the chief demand was for sufficient muscular strength, with a slight modicum of intelligence, for the operation of automatic machinery. But in the vitally important work of inspecting, testing, and sorting the finished product of even the most highly perfected automatic machines and in many of the more delicate operations of assembling and adjusting devices and apparatus made up of a number of more or less complicated parts, intelligence and mental capacity of several different kinds and ranging up to fairly high degrees were called for.

In a number of the larger munitions establishments scientific mental tests were adopted for the selection and assignment to particular tasks of the women workers. Wherever this was done it was found that the output was increased, a higher average of quality maintained, and the labour turnover greatly reduced.

In one of the largest groups of munitions plants at Bridgeport, Conn., there was worked out, under the direction of Dr. Henry C. Link, a system of scientific mental tests which checked up so closely with the actual results obtained by the most skilful workers that their adoption for the examination of all applicants for these positions resulted in very definite time and money savings and increase in plant efficiency.

Two types of work, conducted side by side in the same room, were settled upon as the most fruitful fields for the first experiment. The work chosen was that of inspecting shells before they had been loaded, and of gauging them for head-thickness. This work was being done by 330 girls, two thirds of whom were engaged in inspection and one third in gauging.

The work of inspecting shells was done at a table constructed like an upturned, shallow box. Upon this table was dumped a large box of brass shells, not yet loaded, and all of exactly the same kind. The work of each girl was to inspect these shells and throw out those that were defective. A girl would first gather up a handful of shells, being careful to have them all pointing in the same direction. Then she would put both hands around the shells and turn them up so as to expose their insides. She would then look down into every shell for dents, scratches, stains, and other very minute defects. When any such defect was discovered the shell was extracted from the pile and thrown into one of three or four “scrap” boxes. The entire handful was then turned over and the head of every shell examined for various defects. The shells were then held in a horizontal position on the left hand and allowed to roll from the pile into the right hand. Each shell, in rolling, exposed its lateral surface and was closely scrutinized for scratches, dents, oil stains, and other defects. The good ones were taken in the right hand and dropped into a pocket at the right side of the table, through which they fell into a box below.

This operation required good eyesight (in order to distinguish defects, which frequently were so minute as to be indistinguishable to all but the best of eyes); keen visual discrimination (the ability to determine, with a few glances, which shells were defective); quick reaction (ability to extract, as quickly as seen, the defective shell and toss it into the appropriate box); accuracy of movement (ability to pick out the right shell from a closely held handful); steadiness of attention (ability to prevent bad shells from slipping by or unduly lengthening the operation).

A set of eight tests was selected for the body of the experiment. The first was a simple eyesight test. The second was a card sorting test. The subject was given a pack of 49 cards, upon the face of each one of which from 7 to 12 letters were distributed promiscuously. Twenty of the cards contained the letter “O” and the rest did not. The subject was asked to sort these into two piles, those which had “O” on them and those which had not. The time required for this performance was taken and the number of errors recorded. The object of the test was to bring out the subject’s ability to pick out the essential element from a more or less heterogeneous collection of elements, and also, in some measure, to bring out the deftness of the subject in handling cards.

The third test was a cancellation test. The subject was requested to cross out, with a pencil, every 7. The fourth was a simple “Easy Directions” test. The fifth was a number-checking test, in which the subject was asked to place a check opposite every group which contained both a 7 and a 1. The sixth test was a tapping test, in which the subject was required to push down, as rapidly as possible, a telegraph key to which was attached a counter. The number of recorded thrusts over a period of one minute constituted a record for that performance. The seventh test was an accuracy test. This was given with the aid of a brass plate with nine holes, graduated in size from ½ inch to ⅛ inch in diameter. The subject was asked to take a brass-pointed pencil and insert it into each hole, beginning with the largest and continuing through the smaller ones, until the pointer touched the brass side of one of them. The brass-pointed pencil was wired in circuit with the brass plate containing the holes so that, whenever the brass point touched the side of the hole or any part of the brass plate, an electric contact was made which produced a click in a telephone receiver which the subject held to her ear. At the start of the test, the subject was instructed to put the brass pencil into each hole in succession until she heard a click in her ear, when she was to start all over again. The speed of the subject’s movements was controlled by a metronome, so as to allow thirty trials per minute. This test occupied from two to three minutes.

The eighth test was a steadiness test. This consisted of two brass bars about twelve inches long, set so as to form a long, horizontal V. The subject was asked to take the brass pointer and pass it along between these two bars. The farther she went, the narrower became the space between the bars. As soon as the brass pointer touched one of the bars it produced a click in the telephone receiver. The point at which this brass pointer touched was then read on a scale on the lower bar. Each subject was given fifteen trials and the last ten were averaged and constituted the subject’s average.

These eight tests were given to seventy-three girls, fifty-two of whom were inspectors and twenty-one gaugers. The scores in the tests were compared with the average daily work of the girls. This average was obtained by recording the number of pounds of shells inspected by the girls and the number of hours required for the work. It was found that the inspectors who inspected the largest number of shells in a given time attained the largest scores in the tests, thereby indicating the value of the tests in determining whether an applicant for work as an inspector had the mental capacity for the work.

The same tests were given to the twenty-one girls engaged in gauging the head-thickness of shells. This work does not require the use of the eyes. The operator simply picks up a handful of shells and, with or without looking, tries the head of each shell on a gauge. The gauge is a piece of steel with two notches or openings. The shells which are too small pass through the first opening and fall into a box of rejects below. Those that do not fall through are tried on the second opening and, if they pass through, they are of the right size. If they fail to pass through they are too large and are thrown aside. The operator sits in front of her gauge and tries each shell at one opening and then another, just as rapidly as she can move her hands up and down.

The tests showed, in this instance, an entirely different set of correlations. The comparative correlation scores follow:

════════════════════════════════╤══════════ TESTS INSPECTORS│ GAUGERS ────────────────────────────────┼────────── Card Sorting .55│ .05 Tapping .14│ .52 Cancellation .63│ .17 General Intelligence .14│ .18 Number Group Checking .72│ —.19 ────────────────────────────────┴──────────

Perfect agreement between average daily work and score in the test would be indicated by a correlation score of 1.00, while lack of relationship would be indicated by a correlation of 0 or nearly 0.

The score of the gaugers in the tapping test (.52) showed that they were speedier and had greater endurance. This seems reasonable since, in the operation of gauging, speed of movement and endurance are the chief factors. In the visual discrimination tests, such as card sorting, cancellation, and number group checking, the scores of the inspectors were higher. This quality, however, was not necessary to successful operation in gauging.

In other operations the results of these tests proved their value as a factor in eliminating blunders in the employment office. Girls who seemed, from observation, to possess the very qualities necessary for one or another operation, frequently puzzled their superiors by their failure to perform some highly important operation of their work. The eight tests would have demonstrated this particular inability and would have saved thousands of dollars lost through delay and mistakes. Similar results were obtained in experiments with men workers.

In almost every industrial enterprise, clerical work of some kind or another is necessary, and a problem of universal interest has developed around the selection of clerks. The time required to “break in” new employees runs from two weeks to two months, according to the nature of the routine, and this process invariably is very expensive. By means of standardized mental tests the whole process may be greatly simplified.

In an experiment recently reported tests were given to fifty-two men and women engaged in clerical and near-clerical work. An aggregate number of 440 tests was given. The manager of the department had made a study of these people and had attempted to rate them as to their actual ability.

The tests were classified under the head of tests for _technique_ and tests for _intelligence_. By _technique_ is meant the speed and accuracy shown by clerks in sorting tickets and papers, posting and adding columns of figures, indexing and filing, and in other routine clerical operations. The term _intelligence_ is interpreted to designate the facility and success with which a clerk could master new tasks and follow directions about new work assigned from time to time. The clerk’s _technique_ was indicated by steadiness, arithmetic, card sorting, and substitution-of-letters tests. The _intelligence_ tests included a “hard-directions” test and an “abstract-relations” test, similar to those given in the Mentimeter in this volume.

When all the tests had been given the results were computed and tabulated so as to bring out the following points: (1) the rank of each individual with reference to all the rest; (2) the relation of each of four groups to each other; (3) the relation between technique and intelligence. The results were then submitted to the office head, who compared them with his records and with his own opinion of the relative merits of the various individuals. This comparison showed a very marked agreement between the testimony of the tests and the rankings of the office manager.

The results of these tests so impressed the office manager that he decided to give them to all incoming clerks. One of the first candidates to be examined was a young woman who had recently been interviewed by one of the office heads. The candidate was so unprepossessing in appearance that in spite of signs testifying to her intelligence, the office head was in doubt as to the advisability of hiring her. The psychological tests were applied. When this was done the young woman did remarkably well in every test. She was then hired, and proved herself so ready and capable that it was decided to train her for the work of an office assistant. In six weeks she had mastered the routine of four different kinds of work. This was a striking instance in which the testimony of the tests belied the testimony of observation.

Although there were certain inadequacies in the tests applied, as well as in the judgments obtained from office heads, the value of the results became more and more clear with each passing month. For example, 188 clerks recommended on the basis of the tests and followed up at intervals of one month for a period of three months were estimated as follows:

Percentage of those called good by their superiors

At the end of one month 75% At the end of two months 89% At the end of three months 92%

Another series of interesting experiments to determine the mental capacity of workers in industry was directed at stenographers, typists, and comptometrists. The work of these kinds of workers has been specialized by the use of a standard machine, and in applying tests to this kind of work it was necessary, therefore, to take into consideration two important factors: first, the skill already acquired by the workers at a certain machine; second, the aptitude which the worker possessed for improvement in the use of the machine.

Relevant tests were given to two senior classes of more than three hundred girls and boys in a commercial high school, to seventy-six pupils in two business schools, to a group of twenty-two office typists, to another group of nineteen stenographers, to over four hundred candidates for positions as typists and stenographers, to three groups of more than one hundred and forty comptometrists; and finally, to more than one hundred and twenty candidates for comptometry. More than one thousand persons were tested and more than five thousand tests were given.

Tests for typists included copying, spelling, substitution, and the Trabue Completion test. In the copying and spelling tests, office forms were used. A number of words, purposely misspelled in characteristic fashion, were mingled with words correctly spelled, and the applicant was asked to check off those incorrectly spelled. It was discovered, in the substitution test, that if an applicant without much previous experience in typing does very well in the test, the indication is that she has the necessary aptitude or potential ability to become a good typist with practice. The success of the applicant in the Trabue Completion test indicated his or her ability to complete sentences parts of which are missing. The ability to do this is a great advantage to the typist and one which will increase her capacity.

The Trabue Completion test also proved valuable in determining the ability of stenographers. The most important test probably, for a stenographer, is of her ability to take and transcribe dictation. Tests were given as nearly as possible at the speed which was best adapted to the applicant’s ability. The results were then graded on the basis of the total time consumed and the amount of work done correctly.

In experiments for determining the ability of computing-machine operators various tests were used. One of the most important was a mental-arithmetic test. This was designed to determine the applicant’s fundamental knowledge of arithmetic. Another was a numerical substitution test. In each of the tests conducted the scores of the applicants were compared with the rankings made previously by department heads, and in most instances there was an agreement of sufficient approximation to indicate the value of the tests.

Although still in its infancy, as it were, so far as its practical application in industry goes, the scientific method of mental measurement, wherever and whenever applied in accordance with true psychological principles and by standards and methods devised by trained psychologists, has so completely demonstrated its economic value and social usefulness that its general adoption, as these facts become more generally known, seems inevitable.