Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use ItTrabue, Marion Rex
Science
Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use It
Trabue, Marion Rex
Educational tests and measurements; Intelligence tests; Psychological tests
Very grave errors creep into a rating of efficiency where the ratings
are made by different supervisors, each supervisor rating only a few
men. Even where a detailed schedule of qualities is listed, each to be
given a definite weight or importance in making up the total rating, as
in the Army Rating Scale, the degree of ability which one man’s
experience leads him to call “Average” will call forth a rating of
“Superior” from another equally able supervisor whose experience has
been with slightly different people. If individuals A, B, and C are
rated by the first supervisor and individuals D, E, and F by the second,
it is not at all safe to assume that C is rated fairly in relation to D.
Only when two individuals are rated by the same supervisors upon the
same scale and under the same conditions is it legitimate or safe to
assume that their relative abilities are well indicated by the ratings.
Assuming that the reader has obtained a reliable order of merit for the
individuals he is using as a check upon the value of the Mentimeter
tests, no test should be considered useful which does not result in
approximately this same order of merit. The tests are, of course, so
short and so crude that it is not to be expected that any test will,
except by chance, show exactly the same order of ability as the
production records or supervisor’s ratings furnish, but some tests will
show much closer correspondence than others. Those tests which
correspond most closely should be employed, while those tests which do
not correspond at all should not be employed, regardless of any
statement of the authors or any preconceived ideas of the reader as to
what tests ought to foretell ability in any particular line of work. The
proof of a test or of any method of prognostication lies in the degree
to which it actually arranges people in the order of their relative
efficiency in the tasks for which one seeks to foretell success.
A mere glance at a record such as that shown below for twenty-eight
sixth-grade pupils would show that there was a real relationship between
the scholarship marks, the teacher’s estimate of intelligence, and the
results of educational measurements taken by an outsider.
SCORES AND RATINGS OF SIXTH-GRADE CLASS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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