A TEST FOR SUPERMEN 



Professor Termans Ingenious Method of Finding How Large a Vocabulary One 



Commands Marked Difference Exists Between 



"Average Adult" and "Superior Adult" 



NO SINCiLE test can sup])ly an 

 adequate measure of intelli- 

 gence, but for I£nj^'lish-speakinj^^ 

 persons the vocabulary test prob- 

 ably has a higher value than any 

 three other tests, says Prof. Lewis M. 

 Terman.i In a large majority of cases 

 this test alone will measure the sub- 

 ject's intelligence within 10% of the 

 accuracy of the entire Binet-Simon 

 scale. 



The vocabulary used (printed in a 

 box herewith) consists of 100 words 

 "derived by selecting the last word of 

 every sixth column in a dictionary 

 containing approximately 18,000 words, 

 presumably the 18,000 most common 

 words in the language. The test is 

 based on the assumption that 100 

 words selected according to some ar- 

 bitrary rule will be a large enough 

 sampling to afford a fairly reliable 

 index of a subject's entire vocabulary. 

 Rather extensive experimentation with 

 this list and others chosen in a similar 

 manner has proved that the assump- 

 tion is justified. Tests of the same 

 seventy-five individuals with five differ- 

 ent vocabulary tests of this type showed 

 that the average difference between 

 two tests of the same person was less 

 than 5%. This means that any one of 

 the five tests used is reliable enough 

 for all practical purposes. It is of no 

 special importance that a given child's 

 vocabulary is 8,000 rather than 7,600; 

 the significance lies in tlie fact that it 

 is api)roximately 8,000 and not 4,000, 

 12,000, or some other widely different 

 number. 



"It may seem to the reader almost 

 incredible that so small a sampling of 

 words would give a relialjlc index of an 

 individual's vocabularv. That it does 



so is due to the operation of the ordinary 

 laws of chance. It is analagous to 

 predicting the results of an election 

 when only a small porportion of the 

 ballots have been counted. If it is 

 known that a ballot box contains 600 

 votes, and if when only thirty have 

 been counted it is found that they are 

 divided between two candidates in the 

 proportion of twenty to ten, it is safe to 

 predict- that a complete count will 

 give the two candidates approximatelv 

 400 and 200 respectively. In 1914 

 about 1.000,000 votes were cast for 

 governor in California, and when only 

 10,000 votes had been counted, or a 

 hundredth of all, it was announced and 

 conceded that Governor Johnson had 

 been reelected by about 150,000 plu- 

 rality. The completed count gave him 

 188,505 plurality. The error was less 

 than 10% of the total vote." 



DIRECTION FOR USE OF TEST 



The 100 words thus chosen are ar- 

 ranged approximately (though not ex- 

 actly) in the order of their ditliculty, 

 and the examiner usually begins with 

 the easier words and proceeds to the 

 harder, continuing until the subject 

 examined is no longer able to define the 

 words. "With children under 9 or 10 

 years," Dr. Temian directs, "begin 

 with the first Apparently nomial chil- 

 dr6n of 10 years may safely be credited 

 with the first 10 words without being 

 asked to define them. Apparently 

 normal children of 12 may begin with 

 word 16, and 15-year-olds with word 21. 

 l^vxcept with subjects of almost adult 

 intelligence there is no need to give the 

 last ten or fifteen words, as these are 

 almost never correctly defined by school 

 children. A safe rule to follow is to 



' Tcrman, Lewis M. (Professor of Education in vStanford University). 

 Intelligence. Boston, HouKhton Mifflin Company, 1916. 

 * Providad that the ballots have been shuffled. 



42 



The Measurement of 



