It is rather surprising that systematic studies of human abilities were not undertaken until the second half of the last century… An accurate method was available for measuring the circumference of the earth 2,000 years before the first systematic measures of human ability were developed.
–Jum Nunnally, Psychometric Theory (1967)
(Social science textbooks from the 60′s and 70′s are rad.)
Ironically, there’s still no accurate method for measuring human ability.
Having said that, we’ve been doing comparative testing for quite a while, ranging from the early Olympics to civil service exams in China!
@Bob Carpenter:
>Ironically, there’s still no accurate method for measuring human ability.
Depends on what you mean by both “accurate” and “ability”! Some tests are highly predictive of outcomes we want to know about, so in the sense of criterion validity work pretty darned well.
One big problem is that “performance” is often a bunch of necessary conditions glued together (non-compensatory model) with one or more very difficult to measure variables included in the mix, which means that tests of various sorts can often be used to cull examinees that won’t make the cut, but can’t figure out who will. Example: Tests like the SAT are highly predictive in a university with very broad admissions, but still won’t make very accurate individual level predictions regardlessbecause a giant unmeasured variable (motivation) lies out there. That’s why weeder classes exist, though they are certainly no fun for both teacher and student.
>Having said that, we’ve been doing comparative testing for quite a while,
>ranging from the early Olympics to civil service exams in China!
True in some respects, though most of the civil service exams were pretty far from systematic and largely involved knowledge of a fixed curriculum.
In any event, comparative testing is often all that’s possible because some kind of origin is necessary.