percentage definition of the borderline as the best available under uncertain forms of distribution. The recent rapid perfection of objective scales to measure educational products, like ability in handwriting, etc., in equal units running to an absolute zero of ability, suggests that it might be possible ultimately to state the borderline of deficiency in terms of the same relative objective distance between the best and zero ability at each age on a scale of general ability. This ideal could be approached, for example, with the Sylvester form-board test in which the units are seconds required to complete the same task, if we could agree upon a maximum number of seconds without success which should mean no ability, and if this zero should remain the same at each age. It would only be necessary to take, for example, the best position or the median or the upper quartile at each age as the other point of reference. We could then say that a borderline in physical units was always, for example, .01 of the median record at each age above zero. Such a method would provide relatively equal objective borderlines at each age and it would afford a measure which would take into account the ability of the individuals to be competed against instead of merely counting them as the percentage method must. It would be better than a description in units of the standard deviation in that its significance would be more easily understood if the form of distribution varied with age. To demonstrate its worth, however, this method of defining the borderline in terms of _the same proportion of the physical difference between zero and the median at each age_, would also have to provide a better prediction of ultimate social failure. It would have to be shown that individuals below the relative objective borderline at maturity were below the same relative objective borderline during immaturity. Moreover, it would have to be shown that this relationship was closer than it would be with percentile records. It is a form of this relative objective measurement which Otis advocates in his “absolute intelligence quotient,” which he proposes as logically the best measure of ability. It consists of the ratio of the score of the individual measured in equal absolute units of intelligence, divided by his age (_163_).