WHAT PSYCHOLOGY CONTRIBUTED 381 



cation, civil earnings, intelligence, and certain other qualifica- 

 tions of officers in the different corps and arms of the service. 



The Committee on Classification of Personnel cooperated 

 with several other departments or divisions within the military 

 establishment, thus helping to coordinate its important activities 

 with closely related work and at the same time steadily increas- 

 ing the efficiency of methods of handling personnel. 



But most interesting and perhaps most important of all of 

 the achievements of this successful committee was the trades' 

 test. The prospective importance of this achievement for 

 American industry is so considerable that the work will be 

 described at much greater length than the other and more 

 strictly military tasks of the group. The following account 

 of the development of trade testing within the army is quoted 

 from " Measuring a Workman's Skill ; the Use of Trade Tests 

 in the Army and Industrial Establishments," which was pre- 

 pared by Lt. Col. W. V. Bingham for the National Society for 

 Vocational Education : 



" The development of trade testing has been one of the useful 

 by-products of the war. It had long been recognized that waste 

 of human life and human skill through misplacement in the 

 army or in industry is a futile, costly extravagance ; yet it re- 

 quires the stress of war to make people act on this conviction 

 that the conservation of carpenters, welders, and turret lathe 

 operators is really more important than the conservation of 

 water power and timber land, and that rich returns would 

 accrue to an investment of money and talent directed toward an 

 improvement of the technique of human classification and place- 

 ment. Of the improvement in personnel technique, which has 

 emerged from army experience, perhaps no phase has greater 

 promise of worth for industry than the development of 

 standardized trade tests. 



*' The standardized trade tests were first introduced into army 

 practice last June [1918] when there was pressing need, espe- 

 cially for the truck driver's and auto mechanic's tests, to deter- 

 mine whether the ammunition and supply trains of the divisions 



