The way in
Sir: Hester McIntyre has described in your pages the 'Varsity entrance torture' (9 Jan- uary) she suffered trying to enter Oxford. The utter unsuitability of interviewing for such purposes was demonstrated clearly just after the war when one of my col- leagues, Dr Hilde Himmelweit (later Pro- fessor of Psychology at the London School of Economics.) undertook a comparison of the effectiveness of interviewing and men- tal testing for the prediction of academic success at the LSE. The outcome was spec- tacular. The prediction on the basis of IQ tests was very successful, although the tests were American and not really suited to an English group of prospective students. The senior academics who carried out the inter- views, as they had done for many years, failed abysmally, doing if anything worse than chance. The consequences of this comparison were of course predictable. The LSE. continued to use interviewing, and rejected the use of IQ tests. Their atti- tude was: Don't confuse us with facts; our
minds are made up! Oxford apparently did not even try to discover how poorly inter- viewing of this amateurish sort compares with objective indices; in the USA the widespread use of such tests has been based on their demonstrated validity. Perhaps we might learn something from our cousins?
H.J. Eysenck
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of London, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5
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