A study of fatigue in three-hour college ability tests

Abstract

The subjects used were students who had spent one or two years in a Minnesota State Teachers' College and were transferring to the College of Education of the University of Minnesota. In making this transfer these persons are required by the College of Education to take a battery of college ability tests. This battery of tests requires about three hours of practically continuous work on the part of each individual, and the efficiency of each subject was measured before and after this testing by the Peterson Uniform Equation Completion Test. Neither of the two experimental groups showed any loss in efficiency as measured by scores on the Peterson test after three hours of the type of work described. On the contrary, most of the students appear to be more efficient after the testing than before. An attempt to motivate one group even more than they already had been by the testing situation seemed to have had, if anything, a negative effect on the group. It seems evident that it may be quite safe to require college students to devote at least as much time as is ordinarily done to examination periods without fear either of doing them an injustice from the point of view of measurement or of tiring them unduly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)