Army General Classification Test: WWII Army Alpha successor

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.

The 3 subtests

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All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from: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: https://archive.org/details/TM12260.