EMPLOYMENT PSYCHOLOGY 
exacting in its demands, and at the same time much fairer 
to the students than the old type of school examination. It 
has taken some years to develop the technique of con- 
structing the new-type examinations, but the result has 
been that those university departments which use them are 
now able to measure the relative success of their students 
more objectively and reliably. In so doing, they provide 
the investigator of educational personnel problems a vastly 
better criterion than he formerly had. When psychologists 
turned aside for a time from the devising of psychological 
tests for students, and developed this improved technique 
for measuring actual achievement in school work, they not 
only did a service to education, they made possible later 
advances in psychological research. So also in industrial 
research, time may be gained in the long run by pausing to 
develop good standard examinations of actual skill and 
accomplishment on the job. These are almost certain to 
provide the best single criterion of vocational success, 
where the records do not already furnish suitable measures 
of individual output. 
5s. Accidents and loss due to breakage or claims. These 
are good criteria for use with persons who must handle 
materials which are fragile or easily lost. Freedom from 
accidents has also been used to measure success as a 
street-car motorman or taxicab driver. Such a criterion 
may be combined with measures of quality and quantity of 
output. 
6. Salary. A man’s worth to a firm (and accordingly his 
vocational success) is apparently shown by the salary 
which that company is willing to pay him. Some oi the 
variables which tend to make this criterion unreliable are 
the employee’s length of service with the firm, his family 
relationship to some of the high executives, his ability to 
impress the management with his worth, his enterprise or 
his lack of tact in demanding a salary increase. Many of 
these variables need not be isolated if the investigator 
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