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Society for Military Psychology
Intelligence Testing in the United States Military
- The "Intelligence Testing Movement" began with the publication of the Binet-Simon Scale, which was revised by Lewis M. Terman in 1916 and renamed the Stanford-Binet Revision. This test was administered to over 1,700,000 soldiers in the United States Army during World War I. The results were published in 1921 by Robert M. Yerkes and became known as the Army Report.
- Army Alpha and Army Beta tests were developed by Army psychologists who were working under considerable time pressures to evaluated vast numbers of military recruits.
- Army Alpha test was for literates and Army Beta test was for illiterates, designed to "measure native intellectual capacity."
- "Mental Deficiency. - There is no group in the Army that has the exclusive privilege of recognizing mentally dull individuals. The classification officer, the unit commander, and the surgeon all may encounter an individual who is so stupid as to make himself more of a burden than an asset to the Army. Whenever such an indiviudal is found, it is the duty of the officer to make arrangements to have him tested by a psychologist to determine whether his mental ability is truly as poor as it appears. Again, caution must be exercised to make certain that illiterate individuals are not given verbal tests but are given performance tests. A certificate from the psychologist stating that the man's mental age is below ten or that his I.Q. is below 70, together with a letter requesting the unit commander to initiate action, can usually get these men discharged by Section VIII with little delay." (Manual of Military Neuropsychiatry, 1944)
Excerpt from Adult Literacy in the United States website
"For the present report, four major periods in the history of military mental testing are considered.
- The first witnessed the introduction of mental testing during World War I.
- The second occurred during World War II, when the first large-scale, operational use was made of mental tests for classifying recruits into job assignments. Separate tests were used by the Army and the Navy.
- The third major period occurred in the 1950s, when the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) was specially designed and developed to serve as a test for screening out low mental ability persons for all military services. The AFQT subtest scores were then combined with other tests, which differed for each service, to classify recruits into job assignments.
- The fourth period in military mental testing began in 1976, during the All Volunteer Force, when the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)** was introduced as the single test battery to be used by all military services for both screening and job classification." **the linked site is for a DoD career exploration programs, not specifically used for enlistment