Scope and Contents From the Collection: The Papers of John V. McMillin II primarily chronicle developments at the Measurement Research Center (MRC), which was founded in 1952 by Prof. Everett F. Lindquist of the University of Iowa College of Education. Prof. Lindquist pioneered the design and use of standardized tests in American public schools, beginning in the late 1920's. By 1953, he and his staff developed an optical mark reader (OMR) for scoring students' test answer sheets. The electronic brain, as the OMR was called at the time, was a breakthrough in providing, for the first time, large-scale high-speed test scoring. However, its vacuum-tube technology was becoming obsolete, and by 1959 MRC began work on the design and development of solid-state, or transistorized, circuitry to replace the less stable vacuum tubes. The bulk of the papers document activities at the MRC from 1959 to about 1980 from the perspective of a project engineer, and later engineering manager, who was closely involved with...

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A photocopy reproduction, packaged in a 3-ring binder, of the MRC Engineering JVM Lab Notebook containing designs related to the M-1501 card reader

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Refer to the Archival DVD Folder of this name for an MS Word file 1961-1963 Loose Leaf JVM Eng.Notebook pages.doc for an explanation of the contents of this provided 3-ring binder

Scope and Contents On August 1, 2003, the PEARSON Educational Measurement Company, at their facility in Iowa City, held a 50th Anniversary Celebration of the founding of Measurement Research Center, by Dr. E. F. Lindquist (and to recognize, as well, the successor companies that followed, as the result of MRC being acquired by Westinghouse Learning Corporation (WLC) in June 1968, then National Computer Systems (NCS) acquiring WLC in November 1983, and finally, PEARSON acquiring NCS in 2000, renaming the new entity as NCS Pearson, and finally, in 2002, becoming known as PEARSON Educational Measurement Co. I attended this celebration - as a surviving 'old timer' - who first worked at MRC during my SUI student electrical-engineering days in 1956-57, then later returning from a 2-year stint as an atomic-test engineer in Albuquerque, NM to rejoin Dr. Lindquist's MRC Engineering staff as a project Engineer in March 1959. I rode through the WLC acquisition until I resigned in July 1978, and after two years...

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34-page photo essay; includes CD-ROM

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Includes audio recording on CD-ROM

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Accompany "Memories from the Past" material in Box 5, folder 4

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Contains digital image and text files of many listed items in this guide. DVD copy 1 and DVD copy 2

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Accompanying DVD

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This list describes and includes digital surrogates of all 57 items making up Accession 1 of this collection (Box 1; also Series I). Additional descriptions of artifacts, including illustrations (Series 4). Accompanying DVD

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Accompanying DVD

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Accompanying DVD

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Accompanying DVD

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Accompanying DVD

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This device - roughly cube-shaped with four inches to a side - was in use, as I recall, when I first started working as a student engineer at MRC in 1956. There is an SUI Serial number on the bottom/base of the unit, #119,431, and was built by THE STANDARD ELECTRIC TIME CO., in Springfield, Mass. USA (per the nomenclature on the metal tag riveted to the bottom of the plastic case). I believe this timer was used by Lindquist, and possibly others, to conduct T&M (Time & Motion) studies on various aspects of clerical and/or hand-scoring of tests, or perhaps to measure other important timing functions in the 'early days'. I am happy to include this MRC relic in my Accession Set #3. The Archival DVD Disc Folder: 1950s_SUI Electro-Mechanical Timer contains three JPEG-Image/photos of the timer

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See Box 3, Folder 19

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See Box 4, Folder 25