The Army General Classification Test (AGCT) is an assessment created by the
United States Army
The United States Army (USA) is the primary Land warfare, land service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of th ...
to evaluate the intelligence and comprehension of military recruits.
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
and
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
created the need for this type of testing and provided a large body of test subjects. The early emphasis (World War I) was on determining the level of
literacy
Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...
(
Alpha test
The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...
) among a heterogeneous group. Illiterates were given
another test (Army Beta); some enrollees were interviewed. Subsequent testing targeted
aptitude
An aptitude is a component of a competence to do a certain kind of work at a certain level. Outstanding aptitude can be considered "talent", or "skill". Aptitude is inborn potential to perform certain kinds of activities, whether physical or ...
in order to better fill
roles
A role (also rôle or social role) is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an
expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given indi ...
, such as those provided by officers who obtained commissions from other than the
United States military academies, or to meet the need for increasingly complicated skills that came along with technological progress, especially after World War II.
As with other measurement attempts, the AGCT ran into controversy during the era of the
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...
. Yet, the requirement did not abate, leading to improvements in the application and use of the standard testing methodology.
The modern variant of this test is the
Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is a multiple choice test, administered by the United States Military Entrance Processing Command, used to determine qualification for enlistment in the United States Armed Forces. It is ...
(ASVAB) that was first administered in 1960.
Many high
IQ societies, such as
Mensa and
Intertel, can map their entrance requirements to early AGCT scores.
The AGCT was of interest to researchers because of the breadth of the test taker sample (1.75 million men took the original test).
The Army Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests
The first intelligence tests were created during World War I to screen the thousands of soldiers being recruited by the United States military.
Robert Yerkes and a committee of six representatives developed two intelligence tests; the
Army Alpha test and the
Army Beta test to help the United States military screen incoming soldiers for "intellectual deficiencies, psychopathic tendencies, nervous intangibility, and inadequate self-control".
The Alpha test was a verbal test for literate recruits and was divided into eight test categories, which included: following oral directions, arithmetical problems, practical judgments, synonyms and antonyms, disarranged sentences, number series completion, analogies and information, whereas the Beta test was a nonverbal test used for testing illiterate or non-English speaking recruits. The Beta test did not require those being tested to use written language, but rather the examinees completed tasks by using visual aids. The Beta Intelligence test was divided into seven subtests, which included: "Test 1- assessed the ability of army recruits to trace the path of a maze; Test 2- assessed the ability of cube analysis; Test 3-assessed the ability of pattern analysis using an X-O series; Test 4- assessed the ability of coding digits with symbols; Test 5- assessed the ability of number checking; Test 6-assessed the ability of pictorial completion; and Test 7- assessed the ability of geometrical construction".
Overall, the Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests were designed to find the mental age of military recruits and to assess incoming recruits for success in the US Military by testing one's ability to understand language, to perform reasoning with semantic and quantitative relationships, to make practical judgments, to infer rules and regulations, and to recall general information. The Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests have been criticized for being biased and for not predicting the actual success of incoming soldiers.
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Criticism
*''The Mismeasure of Man
''The Mismeasure of Man'' is a 1981 book by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic ...
'' by Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould ( ; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American Paleontology, paleontologist, Evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, and History of science, historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely re ...
g-loading
The g-loading of the AGCT has not been calculated, although the percentiles of the ASVAB of the 1980s strongly overlaps with the AGCT. The ASVAB test has a g performance strongly comparable to formal intelligence tests. 39 years later, where Flynn effects would have predicted a systematic inflation of nearly 12 points, what was found was a simple fluctuation of the sign of the difference between the tests throughout the range.
References
Further reading
* {{citation , last=Tuddenham , first=Read D. , title=Soldier intelligence in World Wars I and II , journal=American Psychologist , volume=3 , number=2 , pages=54–56 , date=1948 , doi=10.1037/h0054962 , pmid=18911933
Entrance examinations
Military education and training in the United States
Intelligence tests