# The Mystery of the A Men **Status: stub.** Article 2 of six in [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], published in *The New Republic* on 1 November 1922. Published under the original typography "The Mystery of the 'A' Men"; the inner quotation marks are dropped here for link safety. Turns from the headline figure to the machinery that produced it. The army examination sorted men into letter grades — A through E — and [[Walter Lippmann]]'s question is where those categories came from. His answer is that the distribution was not found in the population but imposed on it. The grading curve was a construction decision made by the examiners, and the resulting proportions of "A men" and "D men" therefore tell you about the design of the instrument rather than about the men. This is the series' first sustained demonstration that psychometric results carry their designers' assumptions inside them, presented afterward as discoveries. *Stub — expand with: the full text argument in sequence, verbatim passages, and the specific psychometric claims rebutted.* See also: [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], [[Walter Lippmann]], [[Eugenics]].