Intelligence testing began with a french psychologist named Alfred Binet, who began studying intellectual abilities in 1904 after the french government required that all children attend school and needed a way to tell which children had special needs as students. He assumed all children followed the same course of mental development and that some were simply faster to mature in this sense than others. So he began to measure the ability of children, often finding that some children had more developed intellectually more quickly than the rest of the children their age, and some slower. By taking averages, he was able to assign a mental level relative to the average scores of children of the same chronological age, known as mental age.