Dr Manju Antil (Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist)

As tools for making decisions about people. It is no coincidence that psychological tests as we know them today came into being in the early part of the 20th century. Prior to the rise of urban, industrial, and democratic societies, there was little need for most people to make decisions about others outside of those in their immediate families or close circle of acquaintances. In rural, agrarian, autocratic societies, major life decisions about individuals were largely made by parents, mentors, rulers, and, above all, by the gender, class, place, and circumstances into which they were born. Nonetheless, well before the 20th century, there were several interesting precursors to modern psychological testing within various cultures and contexts.

Antecedents of Modern Testing in the Occupational Realm

A perennial problem in any field of employment is how to select the best possible people for a given job. The oldest known precursors of psychological testing are found precisely in this area, within the competitive examinations developed in the ancient Chinese empire to select meritorious individuals for government positions. This forerunner of modern personnel selection procedures dates back to approximately 200 B.C.E. and underwent several transformations in its long history (Bowman, 1989). The Chinese civil service examinations encompassed demonstrations of proficiency in music, archery, and horsemanship, among other things, as well as written exams in law, agriculture, and geography. The impetus for the development of this enlightened system of human resource utilization—open to any individual who was recommended to the emperor by local authorities throughout the empire—was the fact that China did not have the sort of hereditary ruling classes that were common in Europe until the 20th century. The Chinese imperial examination system ended in 1905 and was replaced with selection based on university studies. In the meantime, however, that system served as an inspiration for the civil service exams developed in Britain in the 1850s, which, in turn, stimulated the creation of the U.S. Civil Service Examination in the 1860s (DuBois, 1970).

Antecedents of Modern Testing in the Field of Education

One of the most basic questions in any educational setting is how to ascertain that students have acquired the knowledge or expertise their teachers try to instil in them. Thus, it is not surprising that the earliest use of testing within education occurred during the Middle Ages with the rise of the first universities in Europe in the 13th century. At about that time, university degrees came to be used to certify eligibility to teach, and formal oral examinations were devised to give candidates for degrees an opportunity to demonstrate their competence (DuBois, 1970). Little by little, examinations spread to the secondary level of education. As paper became cheaper and more available, written examinations replaced oral exams in most educational settings. By the late 19th century, in Europe and the United States, examinations were a well-established method of determining who should be awarded university degrees and who could exercise a profession, such as medicine or law.

Antecedents of Modern Testing in Clinical Psychology

Another fundamental human question that can be addressed through psychological testing is the problem of differentiating the “normal” from the “abnormal” within the intellectual, emotional, and behavioural arenas. However, in contrast to the occupational or educational contexts where the bases on which decisions are made have traditionally been fairly clear, the realm of psychopathology remained shrouded in mystery and mysticism for a much longer period. Several antecedents of psychological tests stem from the field of psychiatry (Bondy, 1974). Many of these early tests were developed in Germany in the second half of the 19th century, although some date from the early part of that century and stemmed from France. Almost invariably, these instruments were devised for the express purpose of assessing the level of cognitive functioning of patients with various kinds of disorders, such as mental retardation or brain damage. Among the behaviour samples used in these early tests were questions concerning the meaning of proverbs, the differences or similarities between pairs of words, and memory tasks such as the oral repetition of digit series. Many of the techniques developed in the 19th century were ingenious and survived to be incorporated into modern tests still in wide use (see McReynolds, 1986). Despite their cleverness, developers of the early forerunners of clinical tests were handicapped by at least two factors. One was the dearth of knowledge concerning psychopathology and the abundance of superstitions and misconceptions. In this regard, for instance, the distinction between psychosis and mental retardation was not even clearly formulated until 1838, when the French psychiatrist Esquirol suggested that the ability to use language is the most dependable. The criterion for establishing a person’s mental functioning A second factor preventing the widespread dissemination and use of early psychiatric tests was their lack of standardization in terms of procedures or a uniform frame of reference against which to interpret results. To a large extent, the techniques developed by 19th-century neurologists and psychiatrists like Guislain, Snell, von Grashey, Rieger, and others were devised to examine a specific patient or patient population. These behaviour samples were collected unsystematically and interpreted by clinicians based on their professional judgment rather than normative data (Bondy, 1974). A significant breakthrough was achieved in psychiatry during the 1890s when Emil Kraepelin set out to classify mental disorders according to their causes, symptoms, and courses. Kraepelin wanted to bring the scientific method to bear on psychiatry and was instrumental in delineating the clinical picture of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which—at the time—were known respectively as dementia praecox and manic-depressive psychosis. He proposed a system for comparing sane and insane individuals based on characteristics such as distractibility, sensitivity, and memory capacity. He even pioneered the free association technique with psychiatric patients. Although some of Kraepelin’s students devised a battery of tests and continued to pursue the goals he had set out, the results of their work were not as fruitful as they had hoped (DuBois, 1970).