What is an Aptitude Test?
An aptitude test is a test of a person’s natural, untrained fitness to do some special thing, like learn foreign languages, play the violin or operate a complicated machine. Aptitude tests should not be confused with intelligence tests or with tests of skill given to people who have had training along the lines of the test. Aptitude tests aim to discover fitness along certain lines rather than to measure progress or intelligence.
Suppose you plan to study the violin but have no idea as to your fitness to do so. There is one aptitude test you can take which may warn you that you face a handicap. This is a test of musical pitch. It will discover your ability, or lack of ability, to tell when a given musical tone is higher or lower than some other given tone. If you do very badly with the test, it would hardly be wise for you to study the, violin since your ear might never permit you to play in tune, no matter how much you practiced. Or suppose you wanted to prepare yourself for an occupation requiring a reliable sense of color. An aptitude test might show that you were color-blind, unable to distinguish red from brown and yellow from orange. The test would save you from a costly mistake. If it showed you to have a fine color sense, you would then have a solid basis of encouragement.
Most aptitude tests are not so simple as the two mentioned because a person’s fitness to do some one thing often depends on more than one ability. This holds true even in the case of playing the violin. Violin playing does not depend on pitch sense alone. There is the question of the player’s sense of melody, for which a test exists. Also there is his sense of harmony to be considered for which various different tests have been developed. Rhythmic sense is also very important to musical performance and it can be tested, Tests are frequently given in groups, called batteries, and in that way tell about a person’s aptitudes somewhat more clearly than single tests could do.
There is a way to test the tests themselves. That is to compare the results of aptitude tests with the later success or failure of the people who took them. These comparisons, known as correlations, are not always favorable to the accuracy of the tests. People have done well at things for which the tests showed them unfitted and the other way around. The problem of discovering talents and predicting success is still far from solved.
