just died, another teacher questioned the children about the details of
this event, in order to find out whether they were in the habit of
reading the newspapers, or understood the things they heard others read.
Other questions related to the names of the streets in the neighborhood,
the road one should take to reach a certain point in the vicinity, etc.
Binet notes that many of the questions were special, and were only
applicable with the children of this particular school.

The method of proposing the questions and judging the responses was also
at fault. The teachers did not adhere consistently to any definite
formula in giving a particular test to the different children. Instead,
the questions were materially altered from time to time. One teacher
scored the identical response differently for two children, giving one
child more credit than the other because she had already judged his
intelligence to be superior. In several cases the examination was
needlessly delayed in order to instruct the child in what he did not
know.

The examination ended, quite properly for a teacher's examination, with
questions about history, literature, the metric system, etc., and with
the recitation of a fable.

A comparison of the results showed hardly any agreement among the
estimates of the three teachers. When questioned about the standard that
had been taken in arriving at their conclusions, one teacher said she
had taken the answers of the first pupil as a point of departure, and
that she had judged the other pupils by this one. Another judged all the
children by a child of her acquaintance whom she knew to be intelligent.
This was, of course, an unsafe method, because no one could say how the
child taken as an ideal would have responded to the tests used with the
five children.

In summarizing the result of his little experiment, Binet points out
that the teachers employed, as if by instinct, the very method which he
himself recommends. In using it, however, they made numerous errors.
Their questions were often needlessly long. Several were "dilemma
questions," that is, answerable by _yes_ or _no_. In such cases chance
alone will cause fifty per cent of the answers to be correct. Some of
the questions were merely tests of school knowledge. Others were
entirely special, usable only with the children of this particular
school on this particular day. Not all of the questions were put in the
same terms, and a given response did no