Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
individuals.
45
Well into the 1970s, IBM PAT served as the de facto
gateway into the programming occupation.
Like the SDC exams, IBM PAT focused primarily on mathematical
aptitude, with most of the questions dealing with number series, fi gure
analogies, and arithmetic reasoning. Although several minor variations
of PAT were introduced over the course of the next several decades, the
overall structure of the exam remained surprisingly consistent. The fi rst
section required examinees to identify the underlying rule defi ning the
pattern of a series of numbers. The second section was similar to the
fi rst, but involved geometric forms rather than number series. The third
and fi nal section posed word problems that could be reduced to algebraic
forms, such as “How many apples can you buy for sixty cents at the rate
of three for ten cents?”
46
Examinees had fi fty minutes to answer roughly
one hundred questions, and so speed as well as accuracy was required.
Critics of PAT argued that its emphasis on mathematics made it
increasingly irrelevant to contemporary programming practices. It might
once have been the case, as Gerald Weinberg acknowledged in his acerbic
critique of IBM PAT in 1971, that programmers would have to add two
or three hexadecimal numbers in order to fi nd an address in a dump of
a machine or assembly language program. But even then the arithmetic
involved was relatively trivial, and the development of high-level pro-
gramming languages had largely eliminated the need for such mental
mathematics. And as for an aptitude for understanding geometric rela-
tionships, Weinberg noted sarcastically, “I've never met a programmer
who was asked to tell whether two programs were the same if one was
rotated 90 degrees.”
47
At best such measures of basic mathematical
ability were a proxy for more general intelligence; more likely, however,
they were worse than useless, a deliberate form of self-deception prac-
ticed by desperate employers and the “personnel experts” who preyed
on them.
48
Weinberg was not alone in his critique of the mathematical focus of
PAT and other exams. As early as the late 1950s, a Bureau of Labor
report had identifi ed the growing sense of corporate disillusionment with
the mathematical approach to computing, contending that “many
employers no longer stress a strong background in mathematics for
programming of business or other mass data if candidates can demon-
strate an aptitude for the work.”
49
As more and more computers were
used for business data processing rather than scientifi c computation, the
types of problems that programmers were required to solve changed
accordingly. The mathematical tricks that were so crucial in trimming
