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Public Domain · 1921

Burt's Mental and Scholastic Tests: British equivalent of Stanford-Binet

The standard British intelligence test of the 1920s through 1950s. Sir Cyril Burt (psychologist to the London County Council) built a comprehensive battery covering verbal, arithmetic, and reasoning items for British schoolchildren. The tests dominated UK educational psychometry for three decades.

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About the Burt's Mental and Scholastic Tests

While American psychologists were building the Army Alpha and the Stanford-Binet, British psychologists were building parallel batteries adapted to UK educational conditions. Cyril Burt, working for the London County Council from 1913 to 1932, developed the standard British battery in his 1921 volume Mental and Scholastic Tests.

Burt's battery covered three areas: verbal/general intelligence (vocabulary, reasoning by analogies, sentence completion), arithmetic (word problems graded by difficulty), and scholastic attainment (reading, spelling, writing). The mental-test items were strongly modeled on Spearman's two-factor theory: each item was designed to load on the general factor (g) plus a specific factor.

Burt's tests were used essentially universally in UK schools through the 1960s. They directly shaped the 11+ examination that determined which British children went to grammar schools (academic track) versus secondary modern schools (vocational track) - a use that has been heavily criticized in retrospect. Burt himself eventually became a controversial figure: his posthumously-exposed fabrication of twin data was one of the biggest fraud scandals in 20th-century psychology.

The 5 subtests

#1
Reasoning by Analogies A is to B as C is to ?
Interactive
#2
Reasoning by Mixed Sentences Unscramble sentences and decide if true or false (Burt's distinctive format).
Interactive
#3
Vocabulary Word definitions of graded difficulty.
Interactive
#4
Arithmetic Word problems of graded difficulty.
Interactive
#5
Reading (scholastic) Read a passage and answer comprehension questions.
Paper Test

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at British grade-school difficulty (age 10-12 ≈ US grades 5-7).

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About these items: These Burt's Mental and Scholastic Tests items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1921 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 1921-era items in their original administration format.

Source

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

Burt, C. (1921). Mental and Scholastic Tests. London: P.S. King & Son.

Cyril Burt (1883-1971) was the most influential British educational psychologist of the 20th century. He was knighted in 1946. His later twin studies are now known to have been partly fabricated (the Burt Affair, posthumously exposed in 1976-79), but the 1921 testing work appears to be sound. Read it on Internet Archive: view it on the Internet Archive.

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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.

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