U21-SvB- Aptitude Career Test

An aptitude is an unlearned area of a competence (the others being knowledge, understanding, learned or acquired abilities (skills) and attitude) to do a precise kind of work at a certain level. Aptitudes may be physical or mental. The unconditioned nature of aptitude is compared to accomplishment, which represents knowledge or ability that is acquired.

Aptitude and intelligence quotient are linked up, and in some ways opposite, views of human mental ability. Whereas intelligence quotient sees intelligence as being a single measurable systematic involving all mental ability, aptitude refers to one of many unlike features which can be independent of each other, such as aptitude for military flight or computer programming. This is more similar to most the theory of multiple intelligences.

Contrariwise, causal analytic thinking with any group of test marks will nearly always show them to be highly correlated. The U.S. Department of Labor's General Learning Ability, for example, is defined by combining Verbal, Numerical and Spatial aptitude subtests. In a given person some are low and others high. In the context of an aptitude test the "high" and "low" scores are usually not far apart, basically because all ability test scores are typically correlated.

Aptitude is better applied intra-individually to ascertain what jobs a given individual is more skilled at performing. Inter-individual aptitude differences are typically not very important due to IQ differences. Of course this assumes individuals have not already been pre-screened for IQ through out some other procedure that include SAT scores, GRE scores, finishing medical school, etc.