Henmon-Nelson Tests of Mental Ability: University admissions test of the 1930s

About the Henmon-Nelson Tests of Mental Ability

By the early 1930s, several colleges and universities wanted a brief group intelligence test to use alongside high-school grades in admissions decisions. The Stanford-Binet was individually-administered and took too long; the Army Alpha was paper-and-pencil but had a heavy verbal load. Henmon and Nelson designed a deliberately speeded test - 90 items in 30 minutes - that mixed vocabulary, arithmetic, analogies, classifications, and number series.

The Henmon-Nelson became a fixture of US college admissions through the 1940s. Its speeded format made it controversial: critics argued that the time pressure conflated cognitive speed with cognitive ability. Defenders argued that the speed component was a feature, not a bug, given the time-pressured nature of academic work.

The test was revised in 1957 and again in 1973 (the latter version remained in use into the 1990s as part of various academic testing batteries). Its descendants include the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) used today.

The 2 subtests

Take the full 90-item test

All 90 items spanning the 12 subtest types of the original 1931 college-level form: vocabulary, sentence completion, opposites, general information, scrambled words, verbal analogies, verbal classification, verbal inference, number series, arithmetic reasoning, figure analogies, and following directions. The original test was timed at 30 minutes; we do not enforce a clock so you can work at your own pace.

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Source & Historical Records

The original test is cited as:

Henmon, V.A.C. & Nelson, M.J. (1931). The Henmon-Nelson Tests of Mental Ability. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

V.A.C. Henmon was at the University of Wisconsin; M.J. Nelson at the University of Iowa. Both were prominent in the second generation of American test developers (after the Army Alpha cohort).

The 1931 Henmon-Nelson booklet was never digitized for free public download (the test remained under active commercial publication through Houghton Mifflin and successor Riverside Insights). Physical copies and finding aids are held at several institutional archives:

• University of Akron - Cummings Center for the History of Psychology - the most complete physical archive (forms 1929 through 1959, manuals, scoring keys, normative data, Houghton Mifflin order forms).
• Wayne State University Archives - 1929 College Students forms A and B.
• Smithsonian National Museum of American History - Form B test booklet (object record with photographs).
• UW-Madison Libraries - 5-volume set with all grade-level forms and examiner manuals.

The interactive test above is an original 90-item reconstruction in the Henmon-Nelson tradition, matching the documented 12-subtest structure. Items are newly written and not copied from the copyrighted 1931 booklet.