Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Studies in Quantitative Psychology
It is not altogether easy to say why one score is better than another. In general, it is no doubt true that by goodness of score is understood the efficiency with which the subject carries out some purpose or attains some end, either on his own initiative or because of the experimenter's instructions. It seems prefer able, however, to define goodness in a more precise manner. There are perhaps several satisfactory ways of doing this. One way is to say that the performance high in goodness is one of which relatively few people are capable. From this viewpoint, it may be said that it is better to solve all ten problems of a test than to solve only three, because fewer people can solve ten than three. But even if we are considering only a single subject, it is still possible to distinguish the good performance from the poor. This mav be done by observing that to make a score of a certain goodness a person must also be able to make the less good scores. Thus, a person who can remember eight or ten nonsense syllables obviously can also remember two. The converse is not true. Likewise, the child who passes intelligence tests so as to obtain a mental age of eight can also pass tests (and will, if they are given him) sufficient to obtain a score of five. The child whose mental age is scored as five, however, cannot pass the tests required to obtain a mental age of eight. It is thus possible to distinguish the good end of a scale from the poor end without any reference whatsoever to the usefulness of the performance or to social environment.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.