A Century of Testing Controversies 1

“Standardized testing is much in the news. New testing programs, test results, and criticisms of standardized testing all are regular fare in the popular media nowadays.” A timely statement, it seems, but it was made 40 years ago. In the years since the publication of Lee Cronbach’s article, “Five decades of public controversy over mental testing,” and Robert Linn’s “A century of standardized testing,” the debates about standardized educational tests have continued to rage. In 1904, Alfred Binet, director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne, initiated the development of a set of tasks that were intended to assess children’s reasoning skills. Based on his earlier research, he had abandoned “medical” techniques for measuring intelligence, such as craniometry, and now sought to use a “psychological” approach. In the early twentieth century, a group intelligence test intended for schoolchildren was introduced into the American public school system.