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 interactive subset

Sample items from the Henmon-Nelson at the high-school / freshman college difficulty level.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

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).