Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART III. FALSE DEFINITION TEST. The question has arisen as to the practicability of substituting a vocabulary test for examinations for college entrance, promotion, etc. Since a word is a sign of an idea, surely the more words one knows, the more ideas he possesses. The larger his vocabulary, the greater we would expect to find the scope of his general knowledge. If words indicate ideas and ideas indicate intelligence, why should we not simply employ a vocabulary test when the intellectual ability or status of an individual is to be ascertained? In the case of grading, or rating, students in the schools and colleges, could a vocabulary test be substituted, either wholly or partially, for the methods now. in vogue ? Is a vocabulary test a satisfactory substitute for examinations in determining the qualifications of an individual, either for admittance to a school or college or for advancement within or graduation from the school or college? Is there a correlation between grades or rank and the size of vocabulary? A satisfactory answer to'these questions can be found only by the method of experimentation. The fundamental purpose of the vocabulary tests which were conducted at Colorado College was to ascertain what relation, if any, the size of an individual's vocabulary bore to that individual's college rank and grades. A secondary purpose was to discover whether or not sex influences play an important part in the size of vocabularies. The attempt to deter/ mine the actual size of individual vocabularies was given less consideration, for reasons which will presently appear. We have seen that different investigators have used different methods for the determination of size of vocabulary. For testing the vocabulary of infants the actual words used by the infant during a ...