2008雅思阅读8分泛读计划(二)

ild up an army very quickly and it had two million inductees to sort out. Who would become officers and who enlisted men? Psychometricians developed two intelligence tests that helped sort all these people out, at least to some extent.  This was the first major use of testing to decide who lived and who died since officers were a lot safer on the battlefield. The tests themselves were given under horrendously bad conditions and the examiners seemed to lack common sense.  A lot of recruits simply had no idea what to do and in several sessions most inductees scored zero! The examiners also came up with the quite astounding conclusion from the testing that the average American adult's intelligence was equal to that of a thirteen-year-old!

 Nevertheless, the ability for various authorities to classify people on scientifically justifiable premises was too convenient and significant to be dismissed lightly, so with all good astounding intentions and often over enthusiasm, society's affinity for psychological testing proliferated.

 Back in Europe, Sir Cyril Burt, professor of psychology at University College London from 1931 to 1950, was a prominent figure for his contribution to the field. He was a firm advocate of intelligence testing and his ideas fitted in well with English cultural ideas of elitism.  A government committee in 1943 used some of Burt's ideas in devising a rather primitive typology on children's intellectual behavior.  All were tested at age eleven and the top 15 or 20 per cent went to grammar schools with good teachers and a fast pace of work to prepare for the few university places available.  A lot of very bright working-class children, who otherwise would never have succeeded, made it to grammar schools and universities.

 The system for the rest was however disastrous.  These children attended lesser secondary or technical schools and faced the prospect of eventual education oblivion.  They felt like dumb failures, which having been officially and scientifically branded.  No wonder their motivation to study plummeted.  It was not until 1974 that the public education system was finally reformed. Nowadays it is believed that Burt has fabricated a lot of his data. Having an obsession that intelligence is largely genetic, he apparently made up twin studies, which supported this idea, at the same time inventing two co-workers who were supposed to have gathered the results.

Intelligence testing enforced political and social prejudice and their results were used to argue that Jews ought to be kept out of the United States because they were so intelligently inferior that they would pollute the racial mix. And blacks ought not to be allowed to breed at all.  Abuse and test bias controversies continued to plaque psychometrics.

Measurement is fundamental to science and technology.  Science often advances in leaps and bounds when measurement devices improve.

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