TRICK-CYCLISTS
SIR,—`Your results in these tests,' said the Personnel Selection Officer at Hyderabad Barracks in 1944, 'show that you're a classical type, as we call it, rather than technical.' I thought the tests a cumbersome method of finding out something that was pretty obvious from my academic history, but nevertheless, the curious thing was that a few weeks later my 'non- technical' bent was put to use by my being posted from the infantry to the Royal Electrical and Mech- anical Engineers, for training as a wireless operator.
Brian Inglis may be right in believing that aptitude tests were successful in 'preventing square pegs from being squeezed into round or rectangular holes,' but experiences like mine, as I remember it, were often matched by others with whom I compared notes at the time. Maybe this helps to explain the 'mildly amused contempt' with which Army psychiatry was regarded by those whose service careers it sometimes arbitrarily shaped.
I am inclined to think that whatever lip-service was paid, in the end, to the value of aptitude tests among `all but the most brass-topped of high-ranking officers,' in practice the PSO's recommendations were
often ignored.—Yours faithfully, PAUL VAUGHAN
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