A series of studies and analyses to develop brief, reliable measures of intelligence and achievement motivation that would be feasible for use in a cross-sectional sample is summarized. One measure of intelligence meets these criteria. It is a 13-item test of sentence completion skill, which correlates effectively with other measures of intelligence and with status and achievement variables in a meaningful way. A questionnaire measure of achievement motivation also emerges as a potentially useful measure for most groups except black females. It correlates moderately well with both a projective measure of achievement motivation and a behavioral assessment of moderate risk-taking in most groups, except the black female group. Both the intelligence and the motivation measures suggested are independently effective in predicting the education attained by black males and white females regardless of their status backgrounds. Only the intelligence measure is an independent predictor of education attainment in white males and black females, regardless of their status backgrounds. (Author/MV)