Several hundred interviews were conducted by this new method, and a few months later we collected evaluations of the soldiers’ performance from the commanding officers of the units to which they had been assigned. The results made us happy. As Meehl’s book had suggested, the new interview procedure was a substantial improvement over the old one. The sum of our six ratings predicted soldiers’ performance much more accurately than the global evaluations of the previous interviewing method, although far from perfectly. We had progressed from “completely useless” to “moderately useful.”
Excellent.
