Word: tested
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...finding a Thing which acted like an inanimate chemical and also like a living, growing organism. It was the virus which causes the "mosaic disease" in tobacco plants. It can spread from plant to plant, multiplying within the living cells, apparently living itself. Dr. Stanley tricked it into a test tube, where it quieted down, the "living" molecules stacking together into protein crystals. But within this seemingly dead chemical, the spirit of life remained. When injected into a tobacco plant, its molecules awoke, became deadly germs again, reproduced after their kind...
...coal bins, jumped off harbor boats, paid up to $1,000 to civilian doctors to tell them how to fake illness. But he also found "psychopathic personalities," and among the toughest outfits: in North Africa soldiers in a crack airborne division took pot shots at Arabs to test their marksmanship, tossed hand grenades among their own men as a practical joke...
Realizing that it could not test non-honors concentrators on the same basis as those with the advantage of tutoring, the department voted to eliminate the divisional examinations for non-honors candidates and to lighten the course requirement structure. With such a move, as Professor Sherburn, the division's chairman, has admitted, the English Department virtually announced that its graduates could no longer attain the level of academic achievement reached by past holders of the degree...
...board's 20 testmakers, not satisfied yet, are working out the super test of tomorrow: something that will measure new aspects of the student's personality. By making him perform the same simple operation over & over, for example, they hope to figure out his "persistence quotient" (one reason why steady, mediocre tortoises sometimes nose out brilliant but unstable hares...
Worthy Distractions. New questions for C.E.E.B. exams are "pretested" on students who are classified from ace to dunce. The test factory writes a biography of each "item" on a card and studies it. If the best students have picked the right answer and the worst ones muffed it, the "item" is ready for use. But if too many good students tripped, the test constructor knows that the wrong choices he offered were not "fair distractors," and he words the problem over again...