EMPLOYMENT PSYCHOLOGY 
150 
employment purposes than general vocabulary tests or 
vocabulary tests per se. 
Although specific language tests like those given have 
been of undoubted value in the selection of employees, 
experience has hitherto tended to prove that their chief 
value lies in their ability to eliminate the most unfit. 
Those who know nothing whatsoever about a certain 
kind of work will fail signally in these tests, and thereby 
eliminate themselves from the necessity of further inter 
viewing. On the other hand, there are those who have a 
bowing acquaintance with a certain kind of work, sufficient 
to enable them to pass the language tests. Actual trials, 
however, may reveal that their verbal ability was some 
what in excess of their actual ability. In spite of this 
limitation, language tests, when properly devised and 
applied, are of great help in the selection of the best 
workers available. 
LITERACY TESTS 
One of the great industrial problems of the day is the 
problem of literacy. When a foreman or gang boss gives 
a set of orders and finds a little later that his orders have 
been entirely misunderstood and that as a result great 
damage has been done, his patience is sorely tried. And 
yet this is only a single, though typical, instance of the 
results of illiteracy. Recently, this problem became par 
ticularly acute in a large manufacturing concern, the 
principal difficulty arising over the inability of many 
machine operators to make out their own work tickets. 
In order to make out these tickets, only the simplest 
knowledge of arithmetic and English was required. 
Nevertheless, so frequent had been the mistakes in addi 
tion and subtraction and in failure to understand the