Home › Historical IQ Tests › Army General Classification Test

Public Domain · 1942 · Military

Army General Classification Test: WWII Army Alpha successor

The WWII successor to the Army Alpha. The AGCT was administered to approximately 12 million US service members during WWII and shaped the classification of every American soldier, sailor, marine, and airman. The methodology directly influenced the modern ASVAB, which still classifies all US military recruits.

Download PDF (Archive.org)Read About the Test

About the Army General Classification Test

By December 1941, US military planners knew that the AGCT had to be substantially upgraded from the WWI-era Army Alpha and Beta. The Alpha had been administered to 1.7 million WWI recruits; the AGCT would need to handle ~12 million WWII recruits while providing more refined classification for the much more technical jobs of the modern military.

The AGCT was developed in 1940-41 by a War Department committee that included academic psychologists L.L. Thurstone, Edward Thorndike, and others. The test had three subtests: Vocabulary, Arithmetic, and Block Counting (the 3D spatial subtest descended from the Army Beta). Total testing time was 40 minutes. Scores were converted to one of five Army Grades (I through V) used to assign recruits to military occupational specialties.

The AGCT classifications shaped every aspect of WWII US military operations: which soldiers went to officer training, which were assigned to technical specialties, which got combat roles, which were discharged as unsuitable. The methodology also fed directly into the modern Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), used today to classify all US military recruits. The AGCT actual items were never declassified; only the procedural manual is in the public domain.

About this interactive version: Unlike the Army Alpha (whose items appear in the public Yoakum & Yerkes 1920 volume), the actual AGCT items were classified during WWII and never officially declassified. The 1942 manual (TM 12-260) describes the procedure, statistics, and sample items but does not reproduce the test booklet. We cannot build an interactive AGCT.

The 3 subtests

#1
Vocabulary 40-item multiple-choice vocabulary section. Word meanings of increasing difficulty.
Items Classified
#2
Arithmetic 30-item arithmetic word problems.
Items Classified
#3
Block Counting (Spatial) 30-item version of the Army Beta Test 2: count cubes in 3D block structures.
Items Classified

Take the full 150-item test

Army General Classification Test (AGCT), 1942 - the WWII successor to the Army Alpha. Used for ~9 million US Army inductees. 150 items in 40 minutes spanning vocabulary, arithmetic reasoning, block counting (described in text), and pattern recognition. US government work, public domain.

No data leaves your browser.

About these items: These Army General Classification Test items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1942 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice. See the original source for the authentic 1942-era items in their original administration format.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

U.S. War Department (1942). Technical Manual TM 12-260: Personnel Classification Tests. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Public domain - US government work. The actual AGCT test items were classified during the war and only sample items appear in the published manual. The technical manual TM 12-260 describes the procedure, scoring, and statistical properties. Read it on Internet Archive: view it on the Internet Archive.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

Looking for a contemporary IQ test?

The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.