Pencil-whip. I’m going to have to remember that expression. It was used by the mental health professional in an NPR interview about the US Army’s method of screening for psychological problems using questionnaires for soldiers to complete. Since it is so obvious to soldiers that how they answer questions will determine what happens to them, they realize their answers are, in effect, indicating what direction they want their Army career to go, which can be determined by a number of factors such as peer pressure, their desire to get back to the unit, their desire to get out of the Army, etc.
The result is that they can “pencil-whip” their way through the questionnaire to make it go where they want it to go, as if they were maneuvering a horse.
I think we are all experiencing these kinds of questionnaires more and more in doctor’s offices these days. It seems like we have always received them in the form of innocuous customer service surveys. None of them is very sophisticated.
I know from my own training in the Army as a social work/psychology specialist that valid psychological tests have to be widely tested to make sure they actually obtain the intended information, and that they should include validity scales built into them so that the reliability of a person’s responses may be rated. It would not be easy to “pencil-whip” through one of these kinds of tests.
The NPR interview:
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/149126019/army-health-care-in-spotlight-after-afghan-shooting?ft=1&f=3
